On Tuesday hard on the heels of two concerts featuring Kaija Saariaho Magnus Lindberg's Finnish

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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. 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). When contemporary music turned indigestible, early music on period instruments satisfied the appetite for new sounds without having to hang them on modern work. It turned into a movement much like new music, each country spawning its own version. So while the UK watched John Eliot Gardiner move from conducting baroque to classical to a grandly titled French-sounding effort for the 19th-century, in Belgium and France a similar career was building up for Philippe Herreweghe. There is no music better suited than the French tradition to the revival of instruments from even half a century ago. Even now, orchestras from francophone Europe make a different sound, but in the past, the contrast with Saxon styles was more extreme.Herreweghe's Orchestre des Champs Elys? is a strong and highly skilled band that comes across the way that Fifties recordings of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande might have done, if the playing had been better and the woodwind more old-fashioned. The punchy, bright brass, the lean and sweet violins, the horns with their bite and lyricism, are a pleasure in their own right They certainly suited the strange scoring of the Franck.