"My favourite instrument," Magnus Lindberg once wrote, "is the orchestra." That statement sums up the Finnish composer, whose work is now the subject of a two-part festival in the South Bank Centre. Lindberg is contemporary music's orchestral wizard. Few composers nowadays use the colossal forces he favours with comparable dexterity, or communicate such an ebullient pleasure in creating a kaleidoscopic palette of tone colours. You have to go back half a century, to the post-Romantics and early modernists, to find his like.
The aim of the festival is to place his work in the context of his personal choice of influences. The opening concert flanked Cantigas - written for the Cleveland Orchestra in 1999 and now given its UK premiere - with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and excerpts from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. All three works take the distant past as their starting point. They are all connected with ritual or ceremony, and they all rely on the cumulative effect of rhythmic repetition for their impact.
Cantigas takes its name from a series of medieval poems addressed to the Virgin Mary, though Lindberg is unashamedly pagan in his approach. Once past a simple opening - oboe and strings trace a delicate, timeless melody based on the sparsest of intervals - he unleashes a riotous, Dionysiac processional of eruptive brass and pulverising percussive throbs. There are hints of church chorales in the sustained string lines that soar intermittently above the melee. A flickering central scherzo briefly lightens the textures while sustaining the momentum. It is music of unashamed flamboyance. The Philharmonia plays it with tangible glee for Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lindberg's close friend and the festival's co-organiser.
The work's debt to Stravinsky's terrorising vision of human sacrifice is more than once apparent, and Salonen's performance of The Rite of Spring has a similar knife-edge intensity. The excerpts from Boris Gudunov are less successful, however. The Tsar's four monologues are strung together with truncated orchestral excerpts, while choral lines have been rewritten for an off-stage band. The sequence highlights Mussorgsky's ironic use of ostinato, first to underpin the ceremonials that surround Boris's coronation, then to depict his descent into madness, but it is impossible to convey the work's range in 20 cramped minutes. The Georgian bass Paata Burchuladze sings with ringing tone, though he lacks dramatic subtlety.
