Einojuhani Rautavaara, who has just turned 81, is Finland’s best-known senior composer, and quite often performed in this country, but it was hard to find Incantations, his new percussion concerto — premiered at the Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with the soloist Colin Currie — much of an advert for Finnish music. There was a large, eager audience for a programme setting this work beside the young Canadian conductor’s account of Bruckner’s enormous Eighth Symphony, and everybody seemed to enjoy everything. Yet it was a concert to make one slightly despair.

As a bruited new piece, the concerto brought all the exciting challenge of an advertising jingle. Rautavaara was once, apparently, a modernist, but is a jolly tunesmith now, not that the tunes are memorable. He is also a diatonic-chordsmith. His harmonic progressions make their presence felt with a rumbling, string-orchestral clout. Plenty of double-bass and cello bars comprising a single semibreve. It’s true the progressions don’t tend to be orthodox. I had a neo-academic moment when I couldn’t help noticing (I was following the score) brazen, immemorially proscribed “parallel fifths” in the lower strings.

That observation was interesting in its way, but not the music itself, the breezy figuration doled out to the soloist, switching between marimba and vibraphone (but using non-pitched instruments, too), whom Rautavaara sees as a kind of shaman, of a Siberian or Laplandish variety. In the classical manner, the cadenza is left to the soloist, and Currie, for whom the work was written, furnished a sterling one that incorporated a pedal cowbell.

The concerto struck me as meretricious, but naively and unwittingly so, and a comparable anomaly seemed to define the Bruckner reading. The playing had a fierce intensity, and the monumentality of the work was well conveyed. Yet an animating spirit, the pulse of life as opposed to the pulse of the baton, was missing. There was an oppressive feeling of whipped-up sonority, of a lack of air around the grand, block-like ideas. The profundity and sensitivity seemed synthetic. It was as if expression could never arise spontaneously from the argument, but had to be pasted on by the assertive conductor.

Conducting from memory, shuffling back and forth and sideways on the podium as though executing complex dance steps — a veritable one-man quadrille — Nézet-Séguin gave the performance his all, and it was far too much. One wouldn’t want to say this isn’t a young man’s piece, but the spectacle of a brilliant talent shattering itself against a mighty edifice was disconcerting, and indistinguishable, in the end, from flashiness.

At Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Britten Sinfonia, playing a work by each of the year’s five main anniversary composers, was conducted by Christopher Hogwood, hardly a young thing, though still youthful-seeming, and indelibly associated, for me at least, with that marvellous educational programme he presented on Radio 3 throughout the 1970s, The Young Idea. When he spoke about the items — telling us that they were not thematically linked, but offered a journey through period interpretation from the baroque style of Purcell and Handel to the classicism of Haydn, Mendelssohn’s romanticism and the 20th-century neoclassicism of Martinu — well, it was just like another thought-provoking episode of The Young Idea.

The concert’s unassumingness, the joy these splendid players evidently take in their work, were refreshing after all the self-consciousness and grandiosity at the Festival Hall. They do not have a permanent conductor, but choose someone for each project. This was Hogwood’s first appearance with them, and the relationship is clearly productive. The six bright minutes of Purcell’s Fairy Queen overture, followed by Handel’s Concerto Grosso in F, Op 3, No 4, encapsulated his gifts as a baroque specialist, and valveless brass and olden timpani were retained not only for Haydn’s Symphony No 70, but also for Mendelssohn’s Fair Melusina overture, giving the latter a surprising and fabulous crackling edge. For Martinu’s Sinfonia Concertante, using four soloists from the orchestra, Handel’s harpsichord continuo was replaced by a grand piano, and the music bristled with life.

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