This concert marked the culmination of John Storgårds's whistlestop tour of the Sibelian landscape with the BBC Philharmonic which presented all seven symphonies in the space of a week. Yet nothing is quite as condensed as the Seventh Symphony itself: a summation of a lifetime's reshaping of symphonic form, compressed into a single movement barely longer than a Mahlerian scherzo.

Sibelius likened the piece to a great river, in which all the formal elements dissolve into a single, fluid entity. It is a work in which Sibelius's innovations with flow were every bit as remarkable as Stravinsky's experiments with pulse; though Storgårds exerted magisterial control throughout, there were points at which his beat became almost illusory – now you see it, now you don't – like a fallen branch disappearing beneath the eddies and re-emerging further downstream.

The leaner, more classically influenced Third Symphony has a more graspable structure, though in later years, the composer came to believe it was really a chamber piece, heard to best advantage with around 50 players. The BBC Philharmonic has considerably more than that; yet the softly plucked cellos in the lullaby-like slow movement had the stealth and tenderness of a parent tiptoeing away from a sleeping child.

The Sixth is sometimes characterised as Sibelius's Cinderella symphony – it requires complete projects like this in order for it to come to the ball. Perhaps it's the austerity that puts people off – the ecclesiastical modes seem to contain the chill of dark mornings in remote Scandinavian churches – while the only relationship its four movements bear to a conventional symphony is that there are four of them. Sibelius stated that while other composers stirred cocktails, he offered pure spring water. In Storgårds, the BBC Philharmonic has a conductor capable of drawing directly from the source.

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