Emmanomination2017

Displaying Mäkynen’s love for trad jazz and his roots in hip hop and sampling, Form is a calm and collected trip through uncharted territories.

As witnessed both on Verneri Pohjola’s Bullhorn and Aki Rissanen Trio’s Amorandom, the musicians breathe together in a magic way. And with Another North, they push the envelope of band ESP even further.

It is difficult to imagine a more interesting premise: the Kamus Quartet, who have been in the same lineup since the group was established, playing suave and energetic chamber music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, György Ligeti and Benjamin Britten.

When the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra brings together some of the works that over the years have been dedicated to the orchestra’s long-standing Artistic Director and now Honorary Conductor Juha Kangas, it is obviously going to be a collection of emotionally and expressively powerful and excellent music – pieces tailor-made for the orchestra’s deep-rooted sound and intense music-making.

​Ives’s Concord Sonata often requires its performer to despatch inhuman quantities of notes at superhuman speed, but Ahonen scoops them up like a kid building sandcastles, with no loss of clarity or of dynamic or rhythmic control.

"Maija Kauhanen's debut album could well be a future classic in Finnish folk music."

The accordion queen Maria Kalaniemi has been around for 30 years but still continues to impress, now by singing as well.

Holding a mirror up to the past can be burdensome. But it can also be a revelation. Both applied to trumpeter Verneri Pohjola as he took the bull by the horns last year and interpreted his father’s music at the Viapori Jazz Festival and at the Tampere Jazz Happening. No mean feat, as Pekka Pohjola (1952—2008) remains one of the revered icons of the 1970s European prog rock scene. The stakes were high but Verneri pulled the concerts off with flying colours.

The two clarinet concertos in this album demonstrate Tüür’s ability to suggest huge tectonic forces at work under dancing or drifting textures in higher instrumental registers.