Opening with the broad Festive March Op. 13, Ondine’s latest release of music by Finnish composer Toivo Kuula presents orchestral works from a composer better known for his vocal writing. Though more solemn than ‘festive’, the expansive March places Kuula in the tradition of Sibelius, with whom he studied composition. Kuula’s orchestral offerings are unfortunately limited: the composer died young, killed in a fight during celebrations for the end of Finland’s Civil War.

The first South Ostrobothnian Suite opens with chorale-like brass and winds underscored by motoring pizzicato strings. The cor anglais is the star of this movement, Landscape, Satu Ala’s tone liquid and tenebrous. The second movement, Folk Song, drips with Finnish melancholy while Ostrobothnian Dance is elegant and convivial. The third movement, Devil’s Dance, is bright and cheery and Song of Dusk is full of rich melody, once again featuring the cor anglais.

South Ostrobothnian Suite No. 2 is the work of a more mature composer, but is very much a suite of convenience raher than musical unity – Kuula himself often performed the movements separately at concerts he conducted. The final movement, Will-o’-the-Wisp, opens with a treacley cello solo and is longer than all of the preceding movements combined. It also has an exotic, programmatic feel very different from the other movements. Rain in the Forest is a vivid, Impressionistic musical evocation; the snare drum hisses white noise, the strings breeze through leaves and the winds are plaintive bird-calls. Minuet is a sedate, neo-classical dance, while The Bride Arrives opens with brassy fanfare, before harp and clarinet process and the orchestra erupts into peals of jubilation. The Dance of the Orphans is the most obviously folk-inspired movement in this suite, a haunting dance featuring the oboe. The album closes with an orchestral Prelude and Fugue, the prelude movement underpinned by pulsing, pizzicato basses, the Fugue giving the Baroque fugue a 19th-century orchestral treatment.

Leif Segerstam leads the Turku Philharmonic in wonderful performances and there are many beautiful moments on this disc. However, this is unavoidably the music of a composer at the beginning of his career, experimenting with a variety of genres and sounds: overall the suites feel cobbled together and the lack of larger-scale narrative prompts the listener to wonder what might have been.