Though Sibelius’s music has come to define whatever Finnish music is supposed to sound like, he certainly wasn’t the country’s only active, turn-of-the-20th-century composer. Several years ago, I enthusiastically reviewed a CD of Oulu Sinfonia – Finland’s, and quite possibly the world’s, most northern orchestra – playing Finnish overtures under Rumon Gamba’s incisive and imaginative leadership.

This CD is the third in Chandos’s series of Finnish music for the stage and I’m even more impressed. Although Sibelius showed little interest in opera, he composed several suites of incidental music for stage productions such as The Tempest, King Christian II and Pelléas and Mélisande. In 1912 his Danish publishers commissioned him to accompany a scenario by the playwright Poul Knudsen (1889-1974). Knudsen had taken much of the plot outline and detail for Scaramouche, reflecting the immense early 20th-century interest in clowns and the commedia dell’arte as well as in erotic desire, death and the macabre. Scaramouche had various guises: a clown, buffoon, even a swashbuckling hero played by Stewart...