orchestral music

It takes courage to stay true to one’s vision and realize it in a way that feels authentic. This release by Eclipse Music provides a cross-section of Yli-Salomäki’s orchestral output. The title Valunta (‘Run-off’) is an apt description of an idiom in which expansive string writing and lingering wind melodies evoke premonitions from the peripheries of the mind.

Whose are the voices we hear at concerts? Which stories are conveyed through art music, and which are not? Questions like this are becoming increasingly common, and now we are starting to find answers to them. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra is engaged in a project titled HUOM, History's Unheard Orchestral Music. The project is reviving orchestral music written by Finnish woman composers in the 19th and 20th centuries, thereby re-evaluating our cultural history, revitalising our concert institutions and fostering new collaboration between music scholars and performing musicians.

Composer Maija Hynninen works extensively with new technology, but this does not diminish the importance of the traditional craft of a composer, quite the opposite. A composer’s work is about listening and processing, and that takes time, she says. For Hynninen, every work is a new process of exploration. She discovered a new kind of courage while studying in California.

"The Earth, Spring’s Daughter is dramatic and gorgeously sounding. [-] Saivo elegantly combines contemporary aesthetics, associations to nature, and a mythological dimension."

"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."

“A certain material, tone combination or chord is nothing on its own, but in the context of a work, it and its significance reaches beyond itself. And similarly, a musical entity can – when all pieces click together – reach over and beyond music as a phenomenon, to interpret humanity. To be available to others, to be recognised: as evidence of what it means to exist,” writes composer Lotta Wennäkoski. This column is part of the series, where composers and other music makers write about their music.

"Haapanen writes for the orchestra as for a collective of virtuosi and the FRSO do not let him down in this scintillating performance."

"I am currently exploring ways of ensuring the audibility of a specific instrument in orchestral texture before rehearsals even begin." This column is part of the series "On my music and beyond", where composers and other music makers write about their music.

"Fridrich Bruk’s music has roots in the tradition of Russian colourful orchestral music. The Latvian kantele-like instrument kokle brings a refreshing twist to the sound palette."

"Though it’s naturally heartening to see Finnish musicians on a Finnish label keeping up the stream of Nordgren recordings, it’s high time the rest of the world caught on to this remarkable music."

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

Armas Järnefelt is today principally known for two lovely miniatures: Preludi and Berceuse. Yet he was the composer of several extensive works who introduced a new, Wagnerian voice into Finnish music.

Paavo Heininen got down to a serious composing career, geared from the outset towards large works, at a relatively early age. This beginning came in the late 1950s, when both dodecaphony and its historical offspring serialism were making their entry into the Finnish musical arena. The newcomers encountered stern resistance: the fact that a couple of composers had determined to use the new method in no sense meant that musical life in general was ready to welcome the fresh ideas with open arms.

"Art should be able to stir us, to wake us from our dreaming and our torpor, so that we should be forced to take a stand on the work and explain to ourselves what it means. If a composition is capable of this, then it has at the same time been able to activate the listener both emotionally and intellectually."