I have heard no more impactful or well-argued work from Kalevi Aho’s pen than his Symphony No 5. It is a symphonic search for answers, consensus or perhaps just freedom from the chaos and contrast of the world in which a tight, dense weave emerges from an opening melee. Over the course of a single movement, that weave is forced through various challenges and crises before literally splitting, two orchestras veering off on different courses (a moment requiring two conductors, for which Dima Slobodeniouk is assisted by Jaan Ots).

In its final section, the symphony musters and enacts a wrenching, intense process of rebuilding which is released in an instant, not unlike the Fifth Symphony of Aho’s most famous countryman. As in Sibelius’s Fifth, the work changed Aho’s view of his own capabilities, convincing him that ‘anything was possible’ in compositional terms. It gets a deep, highly involved performance from the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in which Slobodeniouk marshals all its contradictory intensities towards the final moment of release with skill. It’s hard not to think of the pilot Slobodeniouk balancing his plane in heavy crosswinds and putting it down square in the middle of the runway’s touchdown zone.

Aho’s percussion concerto Sieidi, commissioned by its soloist Colin Currie, isn’t so satisfying – in the long term at least. Its theme is ritual and shamanism in universal terms, though the title comes from the Sámi people’s denoting of a sacred space. Aho says it could be a concerto for orchestra, which sums up the limited ways in which the percussion is integrated into the whole; often, Currie’s spectacular playing doesn’t feel structurally important and could have been taken by any number of other instruments. Ethnic references – African, Arabic, Oriental – feel a little tokenistic, like the typecasting of certain percussion instruments. It will have your foot tapping, but there are plenty of familiar tricks, the ‘fall’ from the Allegretto to the Presto being a particularly old one. Besides, Aho does more fascinating things with rhythm in his own Symphonic Dances (7/04).