Penguin Guide 3 stars; Fono Forum: outstanding. These recordings illuminate a decisive period in Joonas Kokkonen’s artistic development, where rigorous construction meets an unmistakably personal expressive world. Music for String Orchestra unfolds with tightly controlled energy, its persistent minor-second motifs lending the score an almost ascetic tension, yet one that grows organically across a broad symphonic span. The orchestral song cycle The Hades of the Birds, set to poems by P. Mustapää, moves into a darker, more visionary realm, where the mezzo-soprano line emerges as an inward voice suspended between silence and song, and the orchestra shapes an otherworldly landscape of stillness and shadow. The First Symphony crowns the programme as a statement of symphonic belief: although rooted in twelve-tone technique, its logic is never doctrinaire. Instead, Kokkonen bends the system toward an expressive, almost liturgical arc, culminating in a hymn-like finale of restrained but powerful intensity. Throughout, the performances convey clarity of texture and a sense of architectural inevitability, allowing the music’s severe beauty and spiritual depth to speak with quiet authority.