As well as including the two remaining symphonies, the Second and the Third, the outstanding final concert in Sakari Oramo's Sibelius cycle, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, had space for two of the smaller-scale masterpieces. Small-scale in duration that is, though not in expressive weight; for, in just a 10-minute framework, Luonnotar and The Oceanides - both completed in the wake of the Fourth Symphony just before the outbreak of the first world war - build to shattering climaxes that are as fierce and as overwhelming as anything Sibelius ever composed.

But Luonnotar, especially, is much more than that. As the only one of the tone poems to include a voice, this soprano setting of a passage describing the creation of the world from the source book of Finnish mythology, the Kalevala, is the closest we can get to what a mature Sibelius opera could have been like. Anu Komsi certainly treated it like a dramatic scena, injecting dramatic power and an impressive range of colour into its hugely demanding, soaring vocal lines, while Oramo organised the pulsing, threatening orchestral textures. His account of The Oceanides was equally intense, never treating the music merely as a descriptive seascape, but playing to its radically original formal workings, too, while still giving the huge, dark toned climax its full dramatic presence when it finally arrived.

The CBSO's playing was consistently superb, the standard having been set in the crisp performance of the Third Symphony that began the concert. Oramo revelled in the work's compression, but showed himself equally comfortable with the expansiveness of the Second at the other end of the evening. He sustained the dramatic thread through the symphonic, poem-like episodes of its slow movement, sweeping from scherzo to finale with impressive ease, the brass wonderfully secure throughout.