When brain cancer claimed Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in 2023, the classical world lost one of its most distinctive voices, a vivid orchestral painter with a palette forged in Paris’s avant garde electronic music labs. Fortunately for us she worked up until the end, and her final piece, receiving its UK premiere, formed the centrepiece of Sakari Oramo’s smartly conceived programme on themes of death and transcendence.
The concert opened with the spook-haunted Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. Oramo’s imaginatively phrased reading settled in after an initial tendency to grow too loud too soon. It was followed by a pitch-perfect account of Vaughan Williams’ uplifting Toward the Unknown Region. Oramo kept the music’s underlying tread intrepid – no airy-fairy mysticism for him – and the BBC Symphony Chorus responded to the composer’s fluent melodies with robust tone and admirable diction.
