FMQ 1/2007

"It's rather odd, these days, thinking back to the days in the 1960s and '70s when the musical world was riven by the competing claims of tonal and atonal music: in our own polystylist times we simply accept music as good or bad, regardless of the manner of its expression. That's as it should be, of course, but we shouldn't forget the kind of pressure that composers were under to keep abreast of the times - that is, write serial music."

"The hallmarks of Vänskä's conducting, we've long since learned, are a meticulous attention to detail - if it's in the score, you'll hear it in the performance - and an often startling rhythmic energy."

"The work that seems to be doing the international diplomacy is Mäntyjärvi's Four Shakespeare Songs of 1984, one of his earliest surviving works (he withdrew several earlier scores), and as soon as one encounters its opening number, 'Come Away, Death', one understands why: it has that rare capacity in a piece of music of making you think you must always have known it."

"If you are sympathetic to large-scale Shostakovich (in works like the Eighth and Eleventh Symphonies), you will probably enjoy this CD as much as I did, although in the Third Symphony, as in the Second, I wonder whether he doesn't overwork his material just that bit too much."

"His handling of Rachmaninov's barnstorming First Sonata and the contrasting delicacies of Tchaikovsky's suite The Seasons (a movement a month) brings them up as fresh as daisies: the Rachmaninov has a fiery urgency and the Tchaikovsky a buoyant poise which are exhilarating."

The doctoral dissertations in music submitted in Finland in 2005-2006 are marked by two features: the topics are heterogeneous and the approach is multidisciplinary, ranging from the sonic environment and the music-making software of video games right across to Sibelius.

"When I first picked up this CD, I thought that here was yet another Bach recital, the sort of run-of-the-mill release you have to expect to deal with as part of a reviewer's life. But a closer look revealed something far from the ordinary: Jan Lehtola has chosen his programme very cleverly from other composers' transcriptions of Bach, three of the six here being by Oskar Merikanto, three of whose Bach transcriptions were published in his lifetime; these three are unpublished."