FMQ 2/1999

"You are born with a dramatic pulse, with dramatic thinking, and that's that. I've written now about two-thirds, so I call it a marathon," says composer Aulis Sallinen, whose new opera King Lear will be premiered at the Finnish National Opera on 15 September, 2000.

In a book entitled Mielen maisemat ja musiikki (Landscapes of the Mind and Music) Kari Kurkela addresses the problems encountered by the child in learning to play a musical instrument in the light of psychoanalysis and mythology. Lively interaction between training in sensitivity and the constructive channelling of aggression is, he claims, important: so important in fact that without these elements of creativity the child's playing will be reduced to little more than "potty training".

The Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen is equally at home in a Romantic concerto as in music of the Baroque or the present day. When this article was published, he had just premiered Magnus Lindberg’s Cello Concerto in Paris, on 6 May 1999. He here describes how working with composers of his own day and age can help the performer to enter into the minds of composers who lived and died long ago.