Magnus Lindberg (born 1958) is one of the most adventurous and creative composers working today. Influenced by the avant-garde æsthetic of the Darmstadt school, his music was equal parts thorny modernism, shock value, and sheer physical impact. His most notorious work, Kraft (1985), drew as much from the spirit of ’70s punk as it did from Stockhausen. His recent scores, though, find him trying to reconcile harmony and large-scale musical structure without renouncing his preference for edgy, discordant sonorities.

The four works on this CD are his most recent compositions for orchestra, and they show the extent to which he’s already mastered his new idiom. The lead piece, Cantigas, is a highly sectionalized work in which almost all of the music grows out of the simple interval of a fifth. The music is dense and atonal, but Lindberg makes you hear that open fifth over and over again, and it becomes an aural signpost. Parada alternates between blocks of slow-moving sounds and melodic lines that trip breathlessly over one another — much like the first movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, as Lindberg himself points out in an interview in the CD booklet. The contrasts are even more marked in Fresco, where musics loud and soft, colorful and bleak, sit side by side like uncomfortable prom dates. He scores his Cello Concerto for a lighter ensemble than he uses in the other works, allowing the surprisingly warm solo line to be heard clearly.

Indeed, what makes Lindberg’s music appealing to more than new-music specialists is his orchestration skills. And all the color in his scores is brought out via magnificent performances by the Philharmonia. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lindberg’s old school chum, is usually at his best when advocating for contemporary music, and that’s exactly what these authoritative performances do.