In a world of classical concept albums that talk big but just repackage the same old repertoire, this is a thrilling exception. Night and dreams might be well-trodden ground in classical music, but here the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir and Grete Pedersen make them strange and alien once again in a bold and beautiful programme of choral works by Saariaho, Xenakis, Nørgård and Lachenmann.

We talk a lot about ‘journeys’ in classical music, but the skill of this album is precisely this, that it takes the listener by the hand and guides them from Per Nørgård’s fairly earthy, comfortingly melodic Drommesange (Dream Songs) to altogether more confronting musical landscapes. So gradual is the progress from familiarity and reassurance to musical wilderness and nightmarish phantasmagoria in Xenakis’s Nuits that we’re prepared for the experimental textures and extended vocal techniques that might otherwise alienate.

It helps that the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir are so absolutely at their best here, dispatching a programme of challenging works in a variety of contrasting styles with unfussy ease, always placing musicality above self-regarding virtuosity. Take the opener, for example. Nørgård’s 15-minute work drifts with folksy casualness between different musical episodes. Melodies are simple, incapable of bearing the weight of any affectation, and the choir that performs them with whimsical charm couldn’t be further from the sophisticated precision that brings Lachenmann’s textural soundscape Consolation II to life immediately after.

Here song is traded for vocal buzzings, tickings, howlings and moans. Sonically it may be abstract, but the narrative is clearly pointed – a skill also in evidence in Saariaho’s delicately unsettling Nuits, Adieux that serves as a woozy, whispery postscript to the album. Selling works like these in concert is one thing, but on recording the only tools available to anchor their abstraction are spatial. Choir and engineer work together to create a vividly drawn sonic drama – sounds move from background to foreground in seeming motion.

The choir proves their more conventional skills in Nørgård’s Singe die Garten, Mein Herz, offering a welcome contrast to so much evanescence in the muscularity and resonance of the work’s core, embellished with filigree ornaments, an exercise in contrasts. Here, and throughout the disc, the Oslo Sinfonietta offers unobtrusive support – a bell chime, a rustle of strings, a hoot of woodwind all that betrays their presence. This is truly elegant music making, understated in its excellence.