Listening to Magnus Lindberg’s most famous piece, the 1985 work for ensemble, electronics, and orchestra “Kraft,” is a little like getting slapped in the face in super slow motion: You know it’s going to knock you over, but you can’t help appreciating the texture and graceful arc of the hand. Like his colleagues Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kaija Saariaho, Lindberg forged his musical voice in a Finland so Sibelius-obsessed that, even well into Lindberg’s lifetime, joining the national composers’ union still required applicants to compose a symphony. Like his colleagues, Lindberg found a way to harness and redirect that tradition; a pointillistic passage two-thirds of the way through the first movement of “Kraft” recalls, to my ears at least, the disintegrated ending of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5.
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