Lindberg: Graffiti; Seht die Sonne | CD Review

Two of Magnus Lindberg's recent works, among the most substantial that he has composed to date, make a logical pairing. Taken together they show how effective his recent style is in creating large-scale musical structures – music that is far more smoothly contoured than before, a compositional process that he has described as "shaping clay", in contrast to the hard-edged approach of his earlier music, which he likens to "cutting stone". Both Graffiti, the 2009 choral setting of a collection of Latin inscriptions from the walls of Pompeii, and the purely orchestral Seht die Sonne, which was completed two years earlier and borrows its title from the final chorus in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, seem to acknowledge the influence of Sibelius more openly than any of Lindberg's previous pieces. The teeming detail of the two works is far better appreciated on disc than it was at their London premieres; Graffiti in particular emerges as much more stylistically coherent in this performance under Sakari Oramo than it ever did in the Royal Festival Hall last autumn.