There could have been no more fitting climax to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Kaiku festival, a weekend celebrating a century of Finnish music, than Jukka-Pekka Saraste's shattering performance of Sibelius's Seventh Symphony. The piece is the solar plexus of Finnish music, a work that sums up Sibelius's whole career and points toward the radical modernism released by later generations of Finnish composers.
Sibelius remains a granite-hewn colossus in Finnish culture, but Kaiku demonstrated that there is more to contemporary music in Finland than an anxious attempt to deal with his legacy. As Sibelius was finishing his last symphony, Aarre Merikanto was taking a different direction with his Schott Concerto. Avanti!, the Finnish new music ensemble, revealed the work's subtle fusion of atonality and neo-classicism. Instead of Sibelian structure and objectivity, Merikanto's music was cosmopolitan and sensual - notably in the luxurious chord that ended the first movement and the languid opening section of the central movement.
Pianist Nicolas Hodges gave the British premiere, with the BBCSO and Saraste, of Kimmo Hakola's epic Piano Concerto. The piece began as a parody of romantic gestures, with cascades of arpeggios and scales pummelling the audience into submission. The cadenza was unhealthily obsessed with C major, but the music refused to resolve in Hodges' performance until a hilarious, crunching dissonance. However, because of the work's huge scale, what started off as a musical joke became something more serious, even moving: the final movement, Lux, was a luminous shimmer of pianistic figuration.
Kaija Saariaho's Oltra Mar, another UK premiere, was an essay in sea-inspired sensuality for the orchestra and the BBC Symphony Chorus. But it was clarinettist Kari Kriikku's performance of Jukka Tiensuu's Puro that was the highlight of the weekend. In a cadenza of outrageous virtuosity, in which he made the clarinet gurgle, whistle and sing, Kriikku included an irreverent reference to Sibelius's Violin Concerto: a symbol of how the latest generation of Finns have moved beyond his titanic presence.
