Magnus Lindberg

Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was recently premiered by Yuja Wang and the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The concerto is a virtuoso affair, writes Jari Kallio.

"Valkeajoki is so adept at arranging and performing this material that it seems like these nimble arabesques, continuous and expansive pillars of sound and incisive yet organic accents were always intended for keyboard and bellows."

In November 2020, the pandemic situation in Finland has remained calm enough for cultural functions to carry on.* In these exceptional times, there is an unusually great hunger for art, and socially distanced concerts provide a vital antidote to anxiety and uncertainty.

The professional profile and operating environment of Finnish composers of classical music have become increasingly international at a rapid rate in the past three decades. Back in the day, few composers spent extensive periods of time abroad, and any trips they did take were mainly for study or for inspiration and did not necessarily involve immersion in the local music scene. This started to change in the 1990s, as the Finnish music industry began to integrate into the international music industry.

"In both works Hannu Lintu obtains glorious playing from the musicians of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the members of the engineering team can congratulate themselves on recorded sound that ranges from chamber-music delicacy to knee-weakening power at the climaxes."

"Lindberg makes use of characteristic stepwise harmonic progressions and a gorgeously bright orchestration, with brass fanfares and outbursts of solo piano."

Takemi Sosa completed a doctoral dissertation on the orchestral works of Magnus Lindberg at the University of Helsinki, uncovering the Aristotelian dramatic arc governing their structure. This is the first doctoral dissertation on Lindberg’s music completed in Europe.

In summer 1979, a number of Finnish composers and musicians attended a summer course in Siena, Italy. Three of them hit on an idea for a practical joke, and this led to a grand swindle that prompted hilarity on the music scene and had many authoritative figures ending up with egg on their face. The hoax was masterminded by three composers: Eero Hämeenniemi, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg. Both of the latter turned 60 in June 2018.

"Foreigners like me once had the idea that Finland was a difficult country in which to be a composer; so strong was Sibelius’s legacy and so dominant those famous names who succeeded him. But that idea now seems outdated," writes Andrew Mellor in his column on the Day of Finnish Music.

"Pekka Kuusisto astounds the listener once again with his agility in Lindberg’s Violin Concerto (2006), a virtuoso work that is one of his most successful scores."

Barely having finished Joy, the last part of his orchestral trilogy to which his earlier works Kinetics and Marea also belong, and also the Piano Concerto, which is a synthesis of the three, Magnus Lindberg is already planning an “opera spectacle” for Brussels. He is also in the process of writing a large scale orchestral work for the BBC which will be premièred in November.

Composer Magnus Lindberg is constantly engaged in research and development to find new ideas. The passing of time does not make composing any easier – Lindberg intimates that he is more critical now at 50 than he was at the beginning of his career.

Eversince I became familiar with Stockhausen's tempered tempo scales and the organization of time in his 1950s pieces, the rhythmic element has been assuming an increasingly prominent role in my music...

Magnus Lindberg, 28, is among the most internationally successful of young Finnish composers. This year his orchestral work KRAFT took 1st prize in the Unesco International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. Magnus Lindberg's composing muse combines two farces: on the one hand there is a need far the rational arrangement of things, the theoretician at work, and on the other we have the irrational free imagination of the musician. Fused together they generate some of the most poweiful music heard on these shores far quite a while.