I have a Danish colleague at work. He’s quiet, compact, strong, bicycle-crazy, self-reliant, conservative, multilingual, competitive and loves the TV series Borgen, as well as Scandi-crime both written and streamed, as much as he loves being out in nature. Having never been to Denmark (nor indeed to any other Nordic country), I’ve come to see him as the embodiment not just of Denmark but of Scandinavia itself. Which, after reading Andrew Mellor’s excellent book, I realise is accurate in some respects, way off the mark in others.

Mellor is a music critic and journalist living in Copenhagen. His writings will no doubt be familiar to regular readers of Limelight and Gramophone; he also contributes to Opera and the UK’s Financial Times. The Northern Silence is the fruit of his becoming “increasingly absorbed in the topography, traditions, mindsets and wider cultures of the Nordic countries and how they have shaped the music made here”.

Architectural space and musical silence are Mellor’s stiff twin compasses as he travels through parts of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Faeroes listening,...