In October 2015 Ondine’s founder, Reijo Kiilunen – in conversation with Andrew Mellor – singled out Lotta Wennäkoski (b1970) as the Finnish composer of the new generation to watch: ‘Her highly individual way with orchestration, incredible economy of means and discernible musical goals make for music that cleanses the ear with its originality.’ All three compositions here prove the acuity of Kiilunen’s assessment: this is music that knows exactly where it is going and is happy to bring its audience along with it.

The opening item is her coruscating scherzo written for the Last Night of the 2017 Proms, the aptly named Flounce, a model of translucent scoring, fast, free-flowing, immediate in appeal and a near-ideal concert-opener (or encore). The harp concerto Sigla (2022) was composed for the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s Israeli-born principal harpist, Sivan Magen, with whom Wennäkoski worked to exploit the instrument’s full potential in terms of sonority and differences of timbre between its registers. The harp, says Wennäkoski, ‘is the motor that brings the colours of the orchestra to life’, and Magen audibly relishes his role at the centre of events within Sigla’s at times fragile, always precisely imagined sound world. Typically for this composer, the title adds an extra layer to her conception, with a variety of meanings in different languages, reflected to varying degrees in the piece, albeit not always explicitly.

Sedecim (2016) is a triptych commissioned to mark the centenary of the Sibelius Academy Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1916 (the title is Latin for sixteen). Wennäkoski based each movement on an event in that terrible year: respectively, the first publication of the poetry of Edith Södergran, the killing zones of Great War north-eastern France and a theme from Erkki Melartin’s Fifth Symphony. The central movement, ‘Zone rouge (1916-)’, has a tragic, numbed depth that is utterly compelling. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s performances are superb, directed masterfully by Nicholas Collon, beautifully balanced and recorded in first-rate sound. Warmly recommended.