The Finnish element that ran through the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's four-day contemporary-music festival focussed particularly on the works of Magnus Lindberg and that of his exact contemporary and close friend Esa-Pekka Salonen. In the second evening's concert, both also appeared as performers: Salonen conducted the programme, and Lindberg was the impressive soloist in the first public performance in Britain of his own Piano Concerto, completed in 1994.
It's strange that such a substantial and important work in Lindberg's output should have gone unheard in this country for almost a decade. It was in the pieces of the late 1980s and early 1990s that he really emerged as one of the leading European composers of his generation, and the Piano Concerto, economical in its scoring (one of the models was Ravel's G Major Concerto) yet wonderfully rich in its harmonic world, was one of the key works in that process of self-fulfilment. There are three movements contained in its continuous 25-minute span, examining the relationship between the solo instrument and the orchestra from different perspectives. In the first there is the conventional concerto opposition, while in the last the piano is integrated into the ensemble; in the central movement roles get exchanged, the layers of material move at different rates, and finally issue in a huge cadenza, full of real, yet re-imagined bravura writing.
One of the two Salonen pieces was also a UK premiere - his Lachen Verlernt for solo violin, completed last year. It's a kind of chaconne, a series of inventions (studies almost) over a chordal progression that is never heard in its entirety, which gels into a formidable technical showpiece. It was played superbly by the CBSO's music director Sakari Oramo, reminding us that he began his career as a violinist. Salonen has certainly moved a long way from the musical world of his teacher Franco Donatoni, whose last work, Esa: in Cauda V, opened the CBSO's programme - a mosaic of vivid gestures, some laconic, some assertive, that suddenly boils up into a huge climax and then shrugs it all off in a throwaway coda. Salonen's own massive Foreign Bodies ended it, putting the orchestra through its paces in an all too brash, all too derivative way.
