Erik Bergman has long been regarded in his native Finland as one of his country's senior composers, but his music has been slow to make its way abroad. Some of the obstacles are understandable: choral music, for instance, constitutes a large slice of Bergman's output, and the fact that many of his texts are in Finnish or Swedish has obviously (if erroneously) been off-putting for foreign choirs. But the real problem is one of perception. Bergman's music has a particular kind of originality and character which, while in one sense typically Scandinavian, simply does not conform to the expectation that has been conditioned by the more exportable aspects of 19th-century nationalism.