Philharmonia Orchestra/Salonen, Royal Festival Hall, London

There's a lot of Nordic, especially Finnish, music around just now. On Tuesday, hard on the heels of two concerts featuring Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg's Finnish compatriot, the Philharmonia Orchestra launched Related Rocks: the world of Magnus Lindberg with a programme featuring the British premiere of Cantigas.

This 43-year-old Finn is getting the greater exposure here, with a two-part festival, a study day, and even a Lindberg Lounge in the Festival Hall ballroom. Some of the concerts are touring, too. Yet Related Rocks puts the composer in a wide musical context (east European folk music as well as Stravinsky, etc) and actually includes no more than two works by Lindberg in any individual programme. Cantigas was written in 1998-9 for the Cleveland Orchestra and lasts around 20 minutes. It is thus a recent example of Lindberg's considerable prowess as a purveyor of brightly coloured, brilliantly orchestrated scores, including a much higher percentage of genuinely fast music than composers tend to produce these days. It is also, however, a good example of its creator's move away from rhythm, gesture and sheer sonority as prime features to greater concern for harmonic thinking in the context of goal-directed structures.

Two features of Cantigas seem especially significant on a single hearing. One is the prominence of the interval of a perfect fifth, arising from the work's inspiration in medieval Spanish songs (hence the title), which seems to act – thematically as well as harmonically – as a unifying element. While welcoming this further stage in Lindberg's evolution of a more personal harmonic language, I felt that its surface consequences – somewhat anonymous melodic material, brass fanfares and so on – quickly proved rather tiresomely obvious.

The other immediately evident feature of Cantigas is its controlled deployment of acceleration and deceleration in terraced, yet quickly evolving sequences. This leads to a very successful attempt to refine the pacing and the unfolding of different types of slow as well as fast music, making a significant contribution to Lindberg's already enviable capacity for providing music of structural depth as well as surface excitement.

It was good to see a much bigger audience for this composer's music than it received when Lindberg was the first Meltdown director back in the 1980s. On Tuesday, listeners were rewarded with a sensitively complementary, scrupulously prepared and excellently executed programme, which surrounded the new work with Russian music. Excerpts from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov featured Paata Burchuladze as an impassioned, theatrical and wonderfully hall-engulfing presence; theatricality, too, from the percussion department. And Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring gained considerably through Esa-Pekka Salonen's careful observation of the composer's low as well as high dynamic markings, and by holding back until all hell thrillingly broke out at the Vivo section of "Spring Rounds".

Related Rocks continues on 30 Nov, 2 & 7-9 Dec (020-7960 4242)