Hugo Alfvén was an accomplished writer and painter as well as musician and composer. Born in Stockholm in 1872, he studied first at Kungliga Musikhögskolan (the Royal College of Music) and then in Berlin, Dresden, Paris, and Brussels. Influenced by Wagner and Richard Strauss, Alfvén’s style is also permeated with the influence of Swedish folk music. Festspel (Festival Play) was commissioned to inaugurate the new art nouveau building for Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern (the Royal Dramatic Theatre) in Stockholm, in 1908. The work is suitably rousing and celebratory for such an occasion. Alfvén was asked in 1932 to write incidental music for a play by Ludvig Nordström, to commemorate the 300-year anniversary of the death of the protestant Swedish monarch at the battle of Lützen, at the end of the Thirty Years War. The suite that he subsequently extracted is a substantial work in its own right.

Cantus arcticus is perhaps Rautavaara’s best-known work, and was commissioned by the University of Oulu, in northern Finland, to honour its first formal doctoral graduation ceremony, in 1972. Rautavaara instead took his inspiration from the natural environment of the region, incorporating two-channel tape recordings of birdsong as part of the orchestral texture.