The death of Kaija Saariaho, so soon after the first London performances of her opera Innocence and the BBC/Barbican ‘Total Immersion’ day devoted to her work, brings special poignancy to this collection of vocal pieces. Everything here is at the opposite extreme from the large-scale orchestral and operatic works that may be more familiar. But smaller-scale Saariaho can be no less arresting, revealing a musical personality that always sought to access the expressive immediacy available even when quite complex technical devices are in use.

As her health deteriorated, she often worked with her composer husband Jean-Baptiste Barrière and their son Aleksi, a writer and stage director. One particularly imposing example here is Reconnaissance (2020), where Aleksi’s text offers a distinctly pessimistic vision of life in an age dominated by interplanetary exploration and – much closer to home – environmental disasters. His very informative note on the piece describes it as a ‘science-fiction madrigal’ and highlights the contrasting meanings of the title in English and French, along with the special capacity of the choral medium to blur the distinction between individual and collective, ‘me’ and ‘we’. The forcefulness of Reconnaissance as a concert drama stems from its use of relatively restricted resources to project the texts in radically different ways – speech as well as song, sometimes with a fervent, almost hymnlike spirit, other times much more confrontational, distant from any sense of affirmative spirituality.

A much earlier work, Nuits, adieux (1991) is more lyrical and euphonious, less apocalyptic, but it also makes imaginative use of the destabilising effect of combining sounds and noises, natural and artificial. Using just four solo singers, Nuits, adieux is presented twice, once with Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s live electronic accompaniment, once a cappella, with the electronic material rethought for an additional choral group. Is the a cappella version atmospheric enough without the electroacoustic haze thrown around it? I would say that it is, but the presence of both versions gives listeners the chance to make up their own minds.

Écho! (2007) is quite similar in style to Nuits, adieux, using texts by Aleksi Barrière that evoke the classical myth of Echo and Narcissus, and with nicely poetic use of electroacoustic echoing. Saariaho says that writing it gave her the opportunity to re-explore her admiration for Messiaen, but it is the shorter Horloge, tais-toi!, setting Aleksi’s playful text about an obsessively ticking clock, that most directly evokes the exuberance of Messiaen’s choral writing, especially on the smaller scale of Cinq Rechants. Here as throughout, the Helsinki Chamber Choir are outstanding in their versatility and effortless management of every technical challenge, while the recordings, though reverberant, never dissolve into a haze where individual voices lose presence or persuasiveness.

With Saariaho’s settings of Hölderlin’s enigmatic ‘four seasons’ poems, made in 2001 along with the free-standing Überzeugung (‘Conviction’), inevitable comparisons arise with Heinz Holliger’s even more eerily imaginative spectral treatments, which he eventually included within the large-scale design of his mesmerising Scardanelli-Zyklus. Saariaho avoids such intensive and allusive contextualising but packs much drama and sombre eloquence into settings that offer more wide-ranging melodic perspectives than the later works do. Working with Jean-Baptiste Barrière on the electronic material and tackling the difficult task of ensuring that purely natural sounds, such as birdsong, would make a genuinely expressive contribution to the overall effect, she showed the open-mindedness, and eagerness to communicate new possibilities to a wide audience, which were always her most distinctive qualities. She will be much missed on the contemporary classical scene.