I was impatient and frustrated for much of the first act of Marco Arturo Marelli’s production of Eugene Onegin, seen in a revival at the Finnish National Opera. Some leaden conducting (Alan Buribayev), inarticulate orchestral playing and an infuriating cut to the first chorus – presumably intended to preserve the notion of events as distant memory rather than present action – didn’t bode well.

But stick with it, because both production and performance have assets up their sleeve. A directorial tweak sees Onegin try to make up with Lensky as the two face off in the duel, only for Lensky to ram Onegin’s gun into his own stomach and pull the trigger for him – an event witnessed by Tatyana, which lends colossal weight to her predicament at the opera’s climax, torn between justified love and societal expectation.

The staging can’t resist the big directorial cliché that this opera currently attracts like a magnet – the idea of a giant flashback, with a tortured Onegin stalking the front of the stage to witness scenes he’s not involved in. But that disappears when the character is at the heart of the action, and Iurii Samoilov delivers a strong depiction of a man transformed from arrogant twerp into lonely individual seeking a touchingly ordinary form of happiness, if Tigran Hakobyan’s Lensky almost steals the show from him with the best singing on the stage (Matti Turunen’s Gremin comes close).

Aiste˙ Piliba – add her to that burgeoning list of internationally active sopranos from Lithuania – is an archetype Tatyana but there’s no fault in that when the chemistry with her Onegin is so strong. It’s her Letter Scene that gets the whole performance cooking (again, the orchestra doesn’t cover itself in glory), and by the public confrontation in Act 2 we’re getting the sort of electricity that bodes well for the opera’s closing bars. That ending should always be devastating but is elevated with the sort of vocal and human chemistry on display here. Happiness, truly, was within their reach. Tatyana’s return to Onegin for one last kiss proves it. A satisfying if not world-beating Onegin, but I can’t not register alarm that there are so few Finnish singers involved, in what used to be an ensemble company.

On the very same December night, a short way down Töölönlahti Bay at Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo, Esa-Pekka Salonen visited the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra to lead a concert of his own works followed by Sibelius’s Symphony No 2, as broadcast live by YLE and now freely available on its catch-up service Areena. As I’ve written before, these concerts are a joy to watch: elegantly filmed in a screen-friendly hall and supplemented during the interval with interviews and rigorous at-the-piano analysis of the music being played.

The opener, Tiu, is echt Salonen: a short piece in which the structural game is as thrilling as the sound. It is a palindrome playing on the idea of steadily compressing time (a sister piece, perhaps, to Salonen’s Helix) that lasts only as long as its mathematical conceit dictates.

Salonen’s clarinet concerto kíne¯ma follows, the FRSO’s own principal clarinet Christoffer Sundqvist the soloist in the orchestra’s second revival of the piece since its premiere four years earlier. The work is a salute to the movies (and perhaps Salonen’s erstwhile LA) but not an obvious one; there is a sepia tone to the first movement, ‘Dawn’, suave rhetorical gestures that hint at Hollywood atmosphere in the fourth movement, ‘JD in memoriam’, and in the final movement, ‘Return’, an aftertaste of Herrmann’s score for Psycho. The whole score has a distilled, spacious atmosphere and Sundqvist plays with tenderness. Stick around and you see the FRSO’s intendant of 23 years, Tuula Sarotie, being presented with an award for her service upon her retirement.

After the break, Salonen’s account of Sibelius’s Symphony No 2 falls into what we might now, in the light of how younger Finnish conductors such as Dalia Stasevska and Santtu-Matias Rouvali do things, consider a traditional interpretation, built steadily from the bass. I find the central movement the most distinctive, oriented almost entirely around structure, like a game of moving parts (very Salonen). The FRSO’s brass are attractively peaty throughout.

In the interval chat of a concert from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, host Tony Lundman reveals to conductor (Aivis Greters) and soloist (Magnus Svensson) that when Sibelius once conducted his own Symphony No 5 with the orchestra, he included Adolf Wiklund’s Piano Concerto No 1 – also on the bill in this attractive all-Nordic programme. There is plenty to recommend in the viewing experience even beyond Lundman’s interval feature, which you might want to watch first given the unfamiliarity of the music on offer.

Wiklund’s concerto, which opens, dates from 1906 and was a regular feature at the Stockholm Concert Hall until 1981, the last time it was played before this. Grieg, Rachmaninov and Stenhammar are among the work’s influences but I hear neoclassicism, too, and a touch of the burlesque. A forgotten masterpiece? No, but there’s a memorable main theme and an exciting apotheosis to the final movement, and Svensson plays it with real love (and no score). Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad’s Resil I follows, heard for the first time in its version for large orchestra – an atmospheric piece with shades of Adams and Thorvaldsdottir, but one that makes me crave Salonen’s structural cunning.

Greters is an interesting emerging figure: a Latvian conductor known to most up here from his work at the Gothenburg Opera. He is wise enough not to go against the RSPO’s own distinctive Sibelius sound – smooth, with inner warmth rather than craggy insistence, and with a deep understanding of the patterning and figurations that hold this music together. I have been more emotionally flattened by this symphony but I do like the distinctive sound of it from this orchestra, and Greters proves himself worthy in marshalling it.

Type a repertoire work into YouTube and the chances are a performance from the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra will spring up. A handful of videos uploaded in December and January offer the chance to see the orchestra in different venues, something you don’t often get from orchestras streaming on their own channels. This one gives you individual works rather than whole concerts, so you can pick and choose exactly what you want to see and hear.

I was immediately taken with Sebastian Weigle’s recent performance of Strauss’s Macbeth – this from the familiar deep brown of the orchestra’s main home at the Alte Oper – in which the musicians lean into the big moments. Weigle, well known to Frankfurt audiences from running the opera, cuts a Thielemann-like figure on the podium with a look on his face as severe as the interpretation. Conductor and orchestra have the emotional measure of the piece. As in the Stockholm Sibelius, the trumpet-playing is delectable.

At Eberbach Abbey, Alain Altinoglu conducts a performance of Smetana’s Má vlast in which the atmosphere of the church feeds that of the playing. In ‘Vltava’ there’s an appropriately wobbly camera moment just as we slip into the music’s deep rhythmic currents. A performance full of vim and eddying pressures follows, but with sweet repose in the middle section.

At the bijou Casals Forum in Kronberg, German-Columbian conductor Anna Handler leads a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony – the score remaining closed on her stand – whose brisk opening manages to carry ominous weight. She gets a big sound from the orchestra but one influenced by historical performance practice, and there is lovely space for the soloists in the Andante. At home at the concert hall of Hessicher Rundfunk, the orchestra play Schubert’s Fifth under Jonathan Cohen, a performance I found genial but over-polite and a little heavier than Handler’s, despite the lighter‑feeling music.

The orchestra proves its muscle in Bruckner’s Symphony No 6 under John Storgårds, back at the Alte Oper, a performance marked by rhythmic precision, an admirable sense of line and mellow brass. If you enjoy all these, the orchestra has also uploaded a little ‘making of’ film that reveals how the broadcasts come together. Sincere thanks to the licence-fee payers of the Hesse region!

The Events

Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin

Finnish National Opera operavision.eu

Sibelius Symphony No 2, etc

Finnish RSO / Esa-Pekka Salonen areena.yle.fi

Sibelius Symphony No 5, etc

Royal Stockholm PO / Aivis Greters konserthuset.se/en

Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra

youtube.com/@hrSinfonieorchester