Rather like Per Nørgård in Denmark, Anders Eliasson spent much of his career in Sweden pursuing and researching a compositional device. Eliasson didn’t have a name for his schematic use of modal building blocks, which, unlike Nørgård’s Infinity Series, wasn’t so much an algorithmic portal that allowed works to expand infinitely as it was a linguistic device that could, potentially, close them down – in sound as well as design.

Eliasson’s Symphony No 3, effectively a sinfonia concertante with prominent soprano saxophone, was premiered in Trondheim in 1986. (It was originally for alto sax; therein lies a story, as told in Peter Kislinger’s thorough booklet note.) It operates on a continuous weave, the saxophone often riding its surface, whose tightness can put a clamp on the music. To my ears the modality sounds restrictive, rather than a parameter to prompt greater creativity. There are some fine moments, none better than the celestial transition from the ‘Fremiti’ third movement to the ‘Lugubre’ fourth (of five).

Similarly, Eliasson’s Trombone Concerto, premiered in Malmö in 2000, is a work of deeper structural principle than the label ‘concerto’ might denote and one in which the composer instructed the dedicatee Christian Lindberg to ‘play like a caged bird’. Once more the music can chase its own tail, without the degree of structural fascination or universal vision – the sort Nørgård finds from even more restrictive means – that might have rendered such a chase thrilling.

Thank heavens for Eliasson’s Symphony No 4, in which the composer’s obsessive compositional personality yields embracing fruits. Here the tonal journey is better defined, the development of a single motif clearer and more ripe, the textures more varied and the feeling generally more visceral. The semi-concertante flugelhorn opens the second-movement Adagio on an affecting melody and returns for the final slow movement, whose Nordic ending sees it disappear as if through a hidden door. All said and done, a mixed bag. But the soloists give their works everything and the conductors don’t shirk on Eliasson’s firm principles, even if Oramo has more to work with.