Lasting 40 minutes and scored for adult and children’s choruses plus a large orchestra with a hefty battery of percussion, Le Chant des Enfants des Étoiles is Unsuk Chin’s biggest concert work to date. First performed in 2016 at the opening of a concert hall in Seoul, Chin’s birthplace, it arrived in Europe with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia, who had shared in its commission.

The piece offers “musical and poetic reflections on natural phenomena and on our physical relationship with the cosmos”, says Chin. The 12 movements set poems in English, Spanish and Italian (but not in French, despite the title) ranging from Henry Vaughan and William Blake to Octavio Paz and Giuseppe Ungaretti, all shaped into a huge arc that begins with metaphysical speculation and ends in wonder at nature and the cosmos.

Chin’s work has always been fastidiously inventive, and there’s a reminder of that aural imagination in the glinting, chiming orchestral sonorities underpinning the voices here. But the choral music is much less convincing, and strangely unadventurous for an expert group such as the Philharmonia Voices, while the writing for the children (Trinity Boys Choir) inescapably evokes Britten. Words were a problem – surtitles, just a line at a time, proved a poor substitute for printed texts and translations in the programme, and it was often hard to grasp what these reflections and meditations meant.

Chin’s piece took up the second half of a rather odd Salonen programme. Heinrich Biber’s string suite Battalia, famous for its snap pizzicatos imitating gun shots and its highly dissonant quodlibet representing dissolute society, was followed by Beethoven’s second symphony, svelte and energised in the Salonen way, but lacking in any real character.