Allmänna Sången was founded as an academic male-voice choir in the Swedish university city of Uppsala way back in 1830. In 1963 it finally admitted women. It makes further amends here by disseminating the work of 13 female composers – two of whom bagged the choir’s Composition Award with works included on the track list.

It’s clear why Anna-Karin Klockar’s Speeches won in 2016. Her setting of Olympe de Gouges’s speech ‘The Rights of Woman’ is theatrical and properly witty (male voices repeat the womens’ ironic list of sovereign male attributes like unthinking imbeciles), while ‘The Best Friend’, an excerpt from the closing statements of a prosecution attorney at a Missouri trial, furthers verbatim techniques pioneered by Reich, Harvey and Adam Cork. Maria Löfberg’s Sandskrift, the 2014 winner, contains some imaginative and ear-catching writing but the response to Christina Glasell’s imposing text doesn’t move often enough beyond the local implications of individual phrases.

And the rest? Inevitably we’re dealing with something of a smorgasbord. I hear little of interest in the now-routine cluster chords and faux-medieval dances of Cecilia McDowall’s Regina caeli; Libby Larsen’s Songs of Youth and Pleasure are equally derivative and Nana Forte’s Libera me surely speaks too colloquially given the subject matter. Galina Grigorjeva’s In paradisum and Susanna Rosenberg’s Pust do little more than riff on established styles (doubtless the intention), and the indie-pop gait of Clara Lindsjö’s The Find doesn’t suit choral clothing (the text, her own, is beautiful).

Those perceived shortcomings are par for the course given a snapshot of (mostly) local talent. But so, in Scandinavia, are rampantly imaginative creations. Karin Rehnqvist’s concept-piece Tilt is wonderful: a game of repetition and reflection built on the principals of a pinball machine. Andrea Tarrodi’s Lume could have been sculpted for decades, a simple but perfect view of Swedish light with clear but penetrating use of harmony, vowel-production and gentle voice distortion. The choir, very fine but without the last levels of technical excellence that some of their professional Nordic neighbours offer – and sometimes with a slightly woolly soprano tone – rise to the latter piece impressively.