Concert programmes don’t come much more Nordic than this, the first in the Philharmonia’s series of Nordic Soundscapes. Nor would many pieces so aptly fit the subtitle, “music crafted from nature”, as Oceans, a 2018 piece by the Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir. Beginning with icy violins, then layering up notes and harmonies underneath, it conveys first the wide horizons at sea and then, when the deeper brass kicks in, the vastness of water underneath. It’s the kind of music that would go very well with some impressive nature photography – Sigfúsdóttir has orchestrated for Sigur Rós – and, indeed, later on it seems to zoom in or out like a camera shot, but it’s evocative enough to stand on its own.
Next, a Nordic warhorse: Grieg’s Piano Concerto, in which the pianist Stephen Hough made the solo instrument into an agent of disruption, always challenging the more measured, elegant lines of the orchestra, even pushing a little against the silky muted strings in the deceptively calm slow movement. For an encore, Hough gave us Christian Sinding’s piece Rustles of Spring, a Norwegian piano solo favourite of a century ago, its restlessly rippling accompaniment and hopeful melody fitting its title perfectly.
This series is, of course, the brainchild of the Philharmonia’s principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and the big piece here was one that even Finns don’t often get to programme: Kullervo, Sibelius’s first symphony in all but name, based on a tale of incest and doom from the Finnish national epic. It was written when he had mastered the art of large-scale movement in music more convincingly than that of concision, yet its 75 minutes never dragged here. In the third movement, in which Sibelius introduces voices, we had the Ylioppilaskunnan Laulajat Male Voice Choir, all the way from Helsinki, declaiming the story syllabically like four dozen bards, while the soprano Johanna Rusanen and baritone Tommi Hakala wrung every bit of drama out of the roles of Kullervo and his sister. Perhaps the fourth movement could have been snappier – it felt overly jolly in context – but the fifth was a properly dramatic conclusion, setting the seal on an evening of epic music.