Sally Beamish has developed a fresh and individual voice by progressively extending her musical language whilst staying true to her own values. The range of her compositions over the last decade has encompassed two symphonies, a series of concertos for an impressive array of solo instruments, chamber music, an oratorio and an opera. The starting-point for many of these scores for widely differing forces is strongly personal, based on a relationship or friendship, a feeling or an event. Such intensely private inspiration can lend even the most extravagantly orchestrated piece a chamber-like intimacy.

Will Todd, born in Durham in 1970, has an extensive output of compositions to his credit, including highly-charged operas and oratorios, largely centred around themes from northeastern England, notably the workers' struggle against early 19th and 20th-century injustice and oppression. I had heard his emotive cantata The Burning Road performed at St Albans Cathedral in February 2002 – it depicts the relentless, footsore Jarrow Marchers of 1936 who stopped in the city en route to London – and was interested to hear the follow-up in his new opera on an allied theme: The Blackened Man.

The Lahti Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Osmo Vänskä continue to throw new light on Sibelius. The latest discoveries came this autumn: two movements from a lost orchestral suite were given their first performances – as encores, on 19 and 20 September – during the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, now in its third year, and were ‘officially’ premièred on 24 October, when the first version of the tone poem The Oceanides was also given its first performance. The extent to which two works are intimately connected is surfacing in work undertaken by the British Sibelius expert Andrew Barnett, to whose researches this report is indebted.