If one asked composer Magnus Lindberg to name his favourite instrument, his answer would probably be ‘the orchestra’. A case of having one’s cake and eating it? Maybe so, but Lindberg’s answer tells us two things. First, the orchestra remains a powerful creative tool for contemporary composers such as himself; and perhaps more importantly, it reveals the Finnish composer’s image of the orchestra as a single ‘body’, more than the sum of its component parts.

This is powerfully demonstrated in the earliest work included on this recording of live performances by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hannu Lintu. Completed in 1990, Marea presents the orchestra as a force of nature (its title means ‘tides’ in Italian). Formed out of a series of 12-note chords, Lindberg’s undulating wavelike gestures zoom across the orchestral landscape – as if alert to each performer’s stroke, breath, strike and gesture.

The orchestra’s potential is expanded still further in one of Lindberg’s best-known works for the medium, Aura. Premiered in June 1994 by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Aura’s mosaic-like structure alternates concertino-style subdivisions with visceral, full-blown tutti sections. The introduction, featuring low strings, thudding bass drum and contrabassoon, emerges out of the shadows of silence. It’s brilliantly captured here by the FRSO. Lintu maintains greater clarity and focus during the dense tutti sections than Oliver Knussen’s recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

The kaleidoscopic effect of the work’s continuous four-movement structure is also impressively shaped, with the material gradually accumulating across the work’s opening three movements before finally collapsing under the weight of its own pressure in the fourth. Knussen and the BBC SO nevertheless use the propulsive polyrhythms of the final movement to more dramatic ends than the FRSO, imbuing the epilogue – with its sustained high string chords – with a more valedictory quality. (Perhaps this is a reference to its dedicatee, Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, who died while Lindberg was completing the work.)

The final work on this recording, Related Rocks for two pianos, two percussionists and electronics, presents the Finnish composer’s music in a different light. Rhapsodic, free-form and almost improvisational, Lindberg’s approach is more intuitive when writing for electronics. Maybe it’s because he has more direct control over the sounds themselves. The energetic performance, featuring Emil Holmström and Joonas Ahonen on pianos and keyboard samplers and Jani Niinimäki and Jerry Piipponen on percussion, blends vivaciousness with tightrope virtuosity (especially during the Liszt-meets-Liberace moment around two thirds of the way through), although in comparison to Ictus’s equally impressive 1998 recording on Megadisc Classics (nla), the electronic component is rather hidden in the mix.