singer Ville Valo and The Rasmus’s Lauri Ylonen don’t adopt that juvenile throat-cancer bellow favoured by Slipknot and a billion sub-Slipknots.Both bands have a penchant for some surprisingly mainstream cover versions. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this per se: I’ve heard enough nu-metal crunch-riffs to last me a lifetime, and at least H.I.M. Both bands have their Bryan Adams/Bon Jovi moments, ripe for the ascent to stadium status (The Rasmus’s “F-F-F-Falling” bears a disconcerting resemblance to Phil Collins’s “Another Day in Paradise”, H.I.M.’s cigarette lighter-waving ballad “This Fortress of Tears” has a big hammy key change towards the end). The two reputedly hate being compared – rock bands, invariably, are convinced of their own uniqueness – but there are undeniable points of comparison.Both bands play accessible, melodic rock with a romantic sweep to it (in the context of modern metal, they’re more Edward Scissorhands than Freddy vs Jason, if you will) Neither band is breaking brave new musical ground. The Finns are coming.

After cutting sharkishly through the Baltic and traversing the North Sea, they’re circling ever closer to the shores of British pop This is new. Until now.
Their current cultural emissaries are a pair of bands, one goth-rock (H.I.M.), the other goth-pop (The Rasmus), both of whom have been knocking around for a while, but are finally breaking into the British mainstream. Beyond a handful of clich?- they like a drink, they can see the Northern Lights, they kill themselves a lot, Santa Claus – the Finns have kept themselves to themselves. In the past, Finland has made only a meagre contribution to popular culture: Hanoi Rocks, Jimi Tenor, then I’m struggling. There was no actual bopping in the aisles, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some cavorting in the car-park afterwards.. Wagner called it “the apotheosis of the dance”, and with Haitink and his players responding in full measure to its unstoppable dynamism it was very hard to keep the feet still. Nor did Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber really come off, its edgy elation registering merely as jovial solidity.

This showpiece needs a bit of showbiz, something Haitink doesn’t really do.But from the opening bars of the Seventh onwards this looked set to be a vintage performance, and so it proved. It’s characteristic of Birtwistle in its welter of diverse musical imagery, like a sequence of disconnected scenes from an Expressionist film, periods of hyperactivity giving way to uneasy stasis, and ranging from a pawky, Punch and Judy-like humour to manic whistling.This element of drama, often ritualised, sometimes represented visually, is inherent in much of Birtwistle’s instrumental output, but the Sinfonietta’s other item, the 1977 Silbury Air, is different. Birtwistle seems to have absolute control of his material here – though perhaps it’s the other way around At any event its unrelenting power is borderline terrifying. It’s like layers of rock, says the composer, fractured by seismic shifts, and the music explores these subterranean fault-lines almost as if an earthquake were still ripping them apart and smashing them back together in new, bizarrely twisted juxtapositions. With its shifting foreground and background, the material is viewed by Birtwistle from every conceivable angle, including from the inside as he slices his way through it, layer by layer, in a systematic dissection.Fascinating as these pieces were – Silbury Air’s haunted pastoralism places Birtwistle as the heir to, amongst other things, the English visionary tradition of Vaughan Williams and Holst- and superbly delivered by Atherton and the Sinfonietta, the highlight of this grand retrospective thus far has to be Earth Dances, in Dohn?i and the Philharmonia’s thrilling performance on Sunday night.This 40-minute 1986 epic consciously offers a geological comparison. This is a landscape, an exterior one – the inspiration is the enormous, enigmatic 4,500-year-old man-made Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, near where Birtwistle now lives – but presumably an interior one too. Antiphonies (1992), given a determined performance at the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday by the Philharmonia under Christoph von Dohn?i, with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, is a failure.

Modernists have rarely been happy with the concerto genre, with its tradition of showy display and matinee-idol opportunities for some glamorised figure constantly seeking attention at the expense of all the other musicians on the platform. In Ritual Fragment, they also have to move around the stage, each of them stepping forward in turn to add their own individual melodic shapes to the memorial tribute.This idea was developed much further in the 1984 Secret Theatre, where the melody is shared between the instrumentalists, who operate like the star players of a 1940s big-band, stepping out of the ensemble to high-profile their contributions directly to the audience. Birtwistle describes Antiphonies as concerto-like rather than as a concerto, and therein lies the problem, because the piano’s sonorities are too naturally distinctive to adapt successfully to what is essentially a glorified obbligato role.
The vision of Aimard flailing around manfully for a less than generous sonic return while the ground troops of the Philharmonia assaulted him on every side was not a happy one. Even, as here, with amplification, the piano just doesn’t cut through. Nor is the material particularly striking in itself – and that’s rare in Birtwistle.Certainly every note from the composer’s hand in the London Sinfonietta’s Queen Elizabeth Hall programme under David Atherton hit home. There was a sense of nostalgia about this concert, which opened with Ritual Fragment, written in 1990 as a memorial to Michael Vyner, the ensemble’s long-term artistic director.

But the Sinfonietta seems ever more assured in this difficult music, ever more capable of revealing the quirky, idiosyncratic beauty of its fractured surfaces and mangled lyricism. The K3 helped make MG one of the most famous motoring names in the world but the company chose to capitalise on this success with cheap and cheerful sportscars, leaving Bentley and Aston Martin to move to the high ground.. Down on the South Bank, there’s a whole lot of Birtwistle going on – a three-week celebration of the UK’s most admired musical heavyweight, who turned 70 in July. Musical values may have shifted around him, with minimalism gaining ground and John Tavener’s everlasting spirituality winning converts, but Harrison Birtwistle has stuck to his modernist guns for nearly half a century now.