The Swedish composer Moses Pergament (1893–1977) – Finnish-born of Lithuanian-Jewish stock – chose the poems he set to music from a wide range of sources: those heard in this first-ever recording of his songs are mostly in Swedish but also in a variety of other languages. They likewise cover the gamut of human emotion, from buoyant folksongs and children's verses via lyrical expressions of love and loss to stark meditations on suffering and death.

Many of Pergament's poets evoke the natural world in their expression of emotion, but his music never yields to sentimentality: he treats each song as a microcosm, expressed with drama and dignity. Time was when Pergament's vocal music was performed by singers of the calibre of Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth Söderström and Nicolai Gedda; it is high time it was rediscovered.