Why did Erkki Melartin, an exact contemporary of Ravel (in birth and death, 1875-1937) never achieve fame beyond the borders of Finland? Was it because he "dared" to be a Finnish composer who didn't take after his elder compatriot Sibelius in any way? And indeed, his apparently amiable, obliging, open character can't have lent itself to pushing himself onto centre stage, even though he wrote six symphonies, an opera, a ballet, several symphonic poems, a piano concerto, orchestral suites, chamber music and piano works, as well as a huge number of melodies. Amongst these, several were written in Swedish rather than in Finnish - bear in mind that both are official languages in Sweden - and they are sung here by Hedvig Paulig, accompanied by Ilmo Ranta on the piano, who is joined by violinist Jan Söderblom for the Tagore Songs cycle, based on the words of the 1913 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore. Melartin's aesthetics occasionally borrow from the stock of Nordic folklore (real or imagined) but also from oriental sources, "impressionism" à la française, late Romanticism and German expressionism: in short, the composer deploys a thousand different languages, rendering any classification of his work very complicated. Which is certainly no reason to give it a miss! © SM/Qobuz