It wouldn't have taken too much to predict that the first major premiere that Esa-Pekka Salonen would conduct as the Philharmonia's principal conductor just might be a work by his fellow Finn Magnus Lindberg. Salonen and Lindberg go back a long way, to their student days together in Helsinki and Salonen recently conducted the first performances of a number of Lindberg's most important works. But this commission for the Philharmonia, Graffiti, is a major departure for Lindberg too. This setting of inscriptions from the walls of Pompeii, set in Latin, is his first choral work, and it will be fascinating to discover how a composer who has developed such a distinctive, effective style of orchestral writing adapts it to a work using a chorus.
• Royal Festival Hall, SE1, Thu
