Concertante works featuring the recorder, tenor saxophone and accordion are few and far between. Stimulated by daring soloists, the prolific Finnish composer Kalevi Aho has composed such works, contributing in his own way to the development of an original and attractive repertoire. The Concerto for Recorder requires the soloist to play four types of recorder, from bass to sopranino. The work explores extended techniques and also does not shy away from flashbacks to the golden age of the instrument. Aho received the initial impetus for his Concerto for tenor saxophone after a concert by Esa Pietilä. Aho wrote a concerto with contrasting sections that gradually exploits the full potential of the tenor saxophone and also makes use of an oriental goblet drum (darabuka) that sometimes also takes centre stage. The origins of the Sonate Concertante for accordion and strings goes back to Aho’s first Sonata for accordion of 1984. Noting its orchestral character, soloist Janne Valkeajoki suggested making a concertante version with strings. Here, Aho sought to extend the technical possibilities of the instrument to the maximum and to write for it a work of astounding virtuosity, like Franz Liszt’s most demanding piano compositions.

To date, Kalevi Aho has composed sixteen symphonies and twenty-eight concertos, several operas and a large number of chamber works – a rate of production which is all the more impressive considering the complexity and originality displayed by each new work. On this latest in a long series of BIS releases with Aho’s music, two of his most recent works are performed by the musicians of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra. The orchestra and its artistic director John Storgårds have collaborated with the composer on several projects, and the Concerto for Soprano Saxophone is a commission from the orchestra, at the suggestion of the Swedish saxophonist Anders Paulsson. A specialist on the soprano saxophone, Paulsson also demonstrated the instrument’s capabilities to Aho as part of his preparations. The Quintet for Winds and Piano was composed just over a year before the concerto and is here heard in a performance by the pianist Vainö Jalkanen, and woodwind players from the Lapland orchestra. The reason for the unusual combination of instruments is that the work was intended as a companion piece to Mozart’s quintet for the same forces. Closing the album, finally, is the almost 10-minute long Solo I for violin, the first in the composer’s series of virtuosic solo pieces for each of the instruments of the orchestra. It was composed in 1975 and receives a performance from another longtime Aho collaborator, the violinist Jaakko Kuusisto, who has previously performed the solo part of the composer’s Symphony No.3 for violin and orchestra.

Although the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is best known as a symphonist, his constantly expanding catalogue includes numerous concertos as well as countless chamber works and arrangements of works by other composers. This disc brings together works from these three genres.

The Guitar Concerto, dedicated to Ismo Eskelinen, posed many challenges for Aho, who is not a guitarist himself. It is a seven-movement work exploring the different ways the guitar can be used – sometimes with far from traditional techniques – and exploring its sonic possibilities.

The Quintet for Horn and String Quartet was commissioned by Ilkka Puputti, who had previously premièred Aho’s Solo X for horn. Particularly demanding for the soloist, the quintet explores various atmospheres, in turns mysterious, whimsical, dramatic and dance-like.

Contrapunctus XIV from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of the Fugue was left unfinished owing to the composer’s declining health. As he was dissatisfied with previous attempts to complete it, Aho decided to write his own, aiming to remain true to Bach’s style. This completion exists in several versions, including the one for string orchestra heard here, expertly performed by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds.

Widely regarded as one of today's most important composers of orchestral music, Kalevi Aho has written fifteen symphonies to date, but also twenty concertos. Indeed, he himself describes his on-going series of concertos for each of the main instruments in the Romantic symphony orchestra as 'one of the most important and most ambitious of my composition projects'.

One of the latest additions to this series is the Horn Concerto, composed for the Finnish horn-player Annu Salminen who also performs it on the present recording. The one-movement work differs from Aho's other concertos in that it includes what the composer describes as a 'ritualistic' element: the horn’s first entries are heard from backstage, after which the soloist enters the stage, moving gradually from left to right before leaving the stage again towards the end.

In the Concerto for Theremin, there is also a theatrical element, this time springing from the nature of the instrument itself. Invented in 1920, the theremin is the world's first electronic instrument, and consists of two antennae, both of which respond to the movements of the player's hand in the air. The instrument is played without being touched, and Aho describes the experience of hearing it as 'magical – the soloist is like a magician, a weaver of spells, producing music just by moving his hands without touching the instrument at all.' After having been introduced to the theremin by Carolina Eyck, and deciding to write a work for her and the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, this 'shamanistic aspect' led Aho to conceive of 'Eight Seasons': a concerto in eight movements, played without a break, and based on the traditional division of the year by the Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland. The wide range of sounds and effects available on the theremin are used by Aho to depict seasonal events such as the first frost, the melting of the ice and the midnight sun, and his score also exploits Carolina Eyck's unusual ability to simultaneously sing and play the theremin.

This disc also includes a video clip, playable on your computer, with Carolina Eyck’s introduction to the theremin and to Kalevi Aho’s concerto.

Having broken off work on a second violin concerto in 2012, the prolific Finnish composer Kalevi Aho only returned to the project after being contacted by the violinist Elina Vähälä. While aware of the weight of tradition and eager to avoid the pitfalls of violinistic clichés, Aho nevertheless wrote a virtuoso work dominated by the soloist, who is offered many possibilities to realise her own interpretative conception. The orchestral part was specifically composed for the Kymi Sinfonietta with its sound in mind. With his second cello concerto, Aho also wanted to write a piece that orchestras of the size of a sinfonietta could include in their programmes. Here too the solo writing is particularly well suited to the instrument. The youngest winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2015, cellist Jonathan Roozeman takes on this work in five movements played without interruption and in the last section delivers a cadenza as unusual as it is clever. The Kymi Sinfonietta is conducted here by Olari Elts, a champion of contemporary Baltic composers.

REVIEWS:

The music of composer Kalevi Aho is difficult to categorize among the various schools of the day. It is broadly expressive, and in these two concertos, Aho uses virtuosity in a thoroughly Romantic way. Yet the rigor of their construction is of a thoroughly modern kind. Consider the solo passage in the middle of the first movement of the Violin Concerto No. 2. It is… what, exactly? A cadenza? Aho uses the word in his informative notes, but it is really more of a distillation of what has happened previously. The entire movement is filled with powerfully difficult violin writing.

The edgy Violin Concerto and the lyrical, rather moody Cello Concerto are quite different in character, but both balance complex instrumental writing with long orchestral passages in inventive ways. The Violin Concerto has the unusual feature of having been written not only for its soloist, Elina Vähälä, but also for its orchestra, the Kymi Sinfonietta, and it holds together tightly; both works were conceived in chamber orchestra terms. The Kymi Sinfonietta is a remarkable example of the deep bench of Finnish orchestral music. Both of these works ought to be more widely played in concert, and it may be that this fine recording will help make that happen.

-- AllMusic.com

Concertos for cor anglais are few and far between, and harp concertos aren’t very common either. In combining the two, Kalevi Aho has come up with a true rarity – possibly the only double concerto in existence for these two instruments. Composed in 2014, the work was commissioned by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra for two of its solo players: Anneleen Lenaerts and Dimitri Mestdag, who also perform it here. The work is characteristically eclectic, making the most of the sonic possibilities of the solo instruments, but also of the orchestral palette. The Antwerp Symphony Orchestra is no newcomer to Aho’s music, having previously recorded his concertos for trombone and trumpet. On the present disc, it also provides support for the Storioni Trio, in the Triple Concerto for violin, cello, piano and chamber orchestra, a joint commission by the trio and the orchestra. In 2017, as Aho started work on the concerto, his granddaughter was born. Having written a lullaby for her, he decided to use that as the core melodic material of the piece. The lullaby is heard several times in the first movement, which is quite tonal and very dreamlike. It also features in the movements that follow, while the harmonic language becomes more complex. Aho himself describes the work as having ‘a general atmosphere full of joy and positive (sometimes quite virtuosic) energy.’

REVIEW:

The Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is amazingly prolific. Not only are there, so far, seventeen symphonies and five operas, but also no fewer than thirty-seven concertos. Here we have two of them.

The Double Concerto for cor anglais and harp begins very quietly, so quietly in fact that at first I thought there was something wrong with my player while sounds like background noises started emerging. However, the two solo instruments do enter and gradually the work gathers definition and then rhythmic bite. There is a cadenza for the two instruments before the music subsides. This first movement is as long as the remaining three together. The second movement is a short cadenza for the harp alone, a most attractive passage, which leads into a brisk and exciting allegro. The finale is again short and quiet and we return to something like the mood of the beginning.

The Triple Concerto for violin, cello and piano is a more traditional combination, and the listener will at once think of Beethoven’s concerto for the same combination. Aho is obviously aware of this and does something quite different. For a start he uses a chamber orchestra, with strings and just two wind instruments. He rarely employs his soloists as a group together, but writes more in the concerto grosso kind of idiom, with a good deal of interplay between the soloists and the orchestra. If this sounds rather like Martinů, this is deliberate, and I was several times reminded of the Czech master in hearing this work. It is based on a lullaby he wrote for his granddaughter Matilda, which used the musical letters in her name. This comes several times in the dreamy and atmospheric first movement. This is followed by an energetic Presto, then another mysterious slow movement and a finale which starts slowly but soon speeds up.

The performers here are a mainly Belgian team, and they were all involved in the premieres apart from the conductor, who on those occasions was Martyn Brabbins, who has had quite a close association with Aho’s music. For whatever reason, he is not the conductor here, and that role is taken by the Estonian Olari Elts. He does a good job and secures confident performances. The sleevenote, in four languages is helpful. This is a SACD but I was listening in ordinary two channel stereo, in which the sound was immaculate. BIS has been supporting Aho for a long time and this latest issue is a worthy addition to their series. Aho’s fans need not hesitate, and those curious about trying this composer could well dip a toe in here.

-- MusicWeb International (Stephen Barber)

A companion to Jan Lehtola’s recording of Kalevi Aho’s (b. 1949) monumental organ symphony ‘Alles Vergängliche’, this present disc includes five smaller Aho pieces for organ solo, as well as three compositions for organ and other instruments. + Mr. Lehtola has appeared with the leading Finnish orchestras, performed at international festivals and given recitals in leading European churches and concert halls. + He has had works written for him by several composers, including Kalevi Aho.

For those who have followed the career of Kalevi Aho (for instance through the more than 20 discs of his music released on BIS), it will be clear that he enjoys large-scale projects. One such project has been his 'oboe project', composing works in every genre for the instrument. These plans can be said to have begun soon after the Sonata for oboe and piano included here, composed in 1984-85 and thus possibly the first such work for this combination by a Finnish composer. The project received fresh impetus in 2002, when Aho encountered the eminent Belgian oboist Piet Van Bockstal. As a result he composed his Oboe Concerto, premièred by Bockstal in 2008, a work in which Aho wanted to explore fresh directions for tonality as well as creating orchestral music with a more powerful rhythmic pulse and a richer sound-world. As a result the Concerto employs scales from Arabic classical music as a melodic basis in some of its five movements, and also features the Arabic darabuka and African djembe (two types of goblet drum). Although there is no oboe included in the orchestral score, Aho also specifies the use of two of its rarely heard relatives: the oboe d'amore and the heckelphone (a baritone oboe). Three years after the Concerto, the composer returned to his oboe project, and completed it by writing a solo piece for the instrument. Dedicated to Piet Van Bockstal, the 10-minute Solo IX also forms part of another of Aho's projects - a series of large-scale, virtuosic solo works for various instruments. Together with a number of chamber works for different constellations, this disc sums up Kalevi Aho's oboe project, in expert performances by Piet Van Bockstal, supported by the pianist Yutaka Oya, and by Martyn Brabbins conducting the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, for which Aho has composed so much of his music.

With 17 symphonies and 32 concertos to date, Kalevi Aho is one of today’s most prolific composers of large-scale orchestral scores. The present release brings together two works separated by 35 years, but also by the reception they have enjoyed: whereas Sieidi, the percussion concerto Aho composed in 2010, has become one of his most performed works, Symphony No. 5 from the mid-70s is a rarely heard score. Sieidi was written for Colin Currie, who has recorded it here and who performs the concerto with orchestras across the world. Its title, a word in Sami, is used in reference to the rituals and shamanism of indigenous peoples around the world, and the solo part, which makes use of nine different percussion instruments, begins and ends with the djembe and darbuka, drums usually heard in African and Arab music. The instruments are placed in a row towards the front of the stage, and during the course of the work the soloist makes his way across the platform, from the right to the left and back, reinforcing the ritualistic dimension of the piece. Currie is supported by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, a team with a deep familiarity with Aho’s music. This stands them in good stead when they take on the highly complicated score of Symphony No. 5, which in places even calls for a second conductor: wishing to express the incoherence of human existence, the composer lets various, often unrelated musical events overlap, at times dividing the orchestra into two parts playing at different speeds. Composing the work was ‘an exceptional effort’ according to Aho, who adds that it left him ‘with the liberating feeling that everything was now possible – that any musical problem or crisis could be overcome.’

Kalevi Aho needs little introduction to people familiar with the BIS label. He is, quite simply, the foremost Finnish composer of his generation as well as the most prolific. This is the ninth disc devoted exclusively to his music and he has contributed single works to numerous other CDs. Aho is unique among contemporary composers in his concern for the music of his immediate forebears and the first half of this disc consists of his homage to the composer Uno Klami (1900-1961). Klami's greatest work, the ballet score 'Whirls' (CD656), was unfinished when the composer died. He was intending to write the definitive Finish ballet based, as one would expect, on stories from Kalevala, the great poem of Finnish mythology that has inspired so much art in Finland. Kalevi Aho undertook to write the missing third act of this ballet so that the ballet could be performed in full and this was the origin of the 'Symphonic Dances' presented here. The second half of the disc comprises Aho's eleventh symphony. Several of Aho's previous symphonies have included a major part for a solo instrument. Here the 'solo' instrument consists of a huge battery of instruments performed by the six members of the Kroumata Percussion Ensemble! Once again Kalevi Aho displays his ability to get under the skin of an instrument and to communicate his insights in a musical language that is readily accessible.

Continuing a commitment which began in 1989, BIS has released a number of discs dedicated to the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho. These includes programmes with chamber music, but the majority involve large orchestra, performing large orchestral works. One genre favoured by Aho is that of the concerto, and the recently released recording of his Clarinet Concerto made a great impact on reviewers around the world, who described it as 'intensely lyrical, thematically memorable, and beautifully scored' (ClassicsToday.com), 'a deeply moving master-piece' (Fono Forum), and 'a chef-d'oeuvre of our time!' (Classica-Répertoire). This prolific composer is also one of today's great symphonic writers: his current work list includes no less than fourteen symphonies, and nine of these have been released on BIS, to great acclaim - upon its release in 1999, No.7 was for instance greeted as 'one of our century's great orchestral scores' by the reviewer in American Record Guide. But even within such an extraordinary body of works, Kalevi Aho's 'Symphony No.12, Luosto',holds a very special place. Written for a performance on the slopes of Mount Luosto in Finnish Lapland, it makes use of two orchestras, two vocal soloists and a number of brass players and percussionists placed at various distances from each other and the conductor, surrounding the audience. The primary inspiration for this four-movement work came from the natural surroundings and traditions of Lapland, and parts of it were actually composed during a bitterly cold spell in the solitude of a cottage at the foot of Orresokka, the mountain next to Luosto. The three-dimensional qualities written into the score makes it the perfect subject for a Surround Sound recording, and during the recording sessions in the acclaimed acoustics of the Lahti Sibelius Hall, great pains were taken to recreate the set-up of the first performance. This took place in 2003, in front of - or rather around - an audience of over 2000 people, and became the starting point of 'LuostoClassic', an annual summer music festival which in 2008 features another performance of Aho's symphony. Among the performers on the present recording, the vocal soloists, the Chamber Orchestra of Lapland and the conductor John Storgårds all took part in the première of the work. The uniqueness of the work, in terms of both sonic qualities and conception, would render any additional work meaningless in the context of a single disc, which is why it is published on its own despite the playing time of just under 50 minutes.

'My apotheosis of the dance' is how Kalevi Aho describes his Symphony No.15. With two dance movements and rhythm a central element, the score calls for numerous percussion instruments, including non-Western ones such as bongos, darbuka, djembe and the riqq, an Arabian tambourine. The composer's interest in non-Western music and instruments has been evident in several recent works, such as his Symphony No. 14 (recorded on BIS-1686) and Oboe Concerto (BIS-1876). It also played an important part during the creation of Minea, composed as a concert opener for the Minnesota Orchestra on the initiative of Osmo Vänskä, who also conducts the work here. Mentioning Indian ragas, Japanese shakuhachi music, Arabian rhythms and Eastern scales, Aho explains that his aim has been to expand his own sound world with elements of other classical music cultures, and to try to view the Western musical tradition from other perspectives. Minea and Symphony No.15 frame the composer's Concerto for Double Bass, composed in 2005 for Eero Munter. In order to be able to write idiomatically for the instrument, the composer borrowed a double bass, and as work on the piece progressed, he actually grew proficient enough to try out most of the solo part - albeit at a very slow tempo, as he freely admits! The concerto offers the opportunity to hear the solo instrument in highly unusual contexts, for instance in the two accompanied cadenzas - the first a pizzicato duet with the harp, and the second a trio with two percussionists. Throughout the disc we hear the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, which for more than 20 years has made a remarkable commitment to the composer, performing and recording a large number of his works. The orchestra is conducted by Jaakko Kuusisto and Dima Slobodeniouk, as well as by the above-mentioned Osmo Vänskä.

This disc is very BIS. It brings together several extraordinary talents in a programme that skillfully links together the old and the new. The unifying factor is Kalevi Aho - the leading compoer of his generation in Finland. It features his third symphony - Sinfonia concertante for violin and orchestra. Jaakko Kuusisto, the leading Finnish violinist of his generation, is the soloist. The other work on this disc is Mussorgsky's song cycle 'Songs and Dances of Death' which Aho orchestrated for the great Finnish bass Martti Talvela. Here the soloist is the most fêted bass of his generation, Matti Salminen. To complete this glamorous package we have Osmo Vänskä conducting his Lahti Symphony Orchestra. The recordings were supervised by the celebrated BIS team of Robert Suff and Ingo Petry and took place in the stunning new all-wood concert hall in Lahti.

Hugely prolific as well as widely acclaimed, Kalevi Aho has composed 30 concertos to date. Many of them are available in recordings from BIS, and the present release features two works from the past decade. The Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra was commissioned for Jörgen van Rijen, who also performs it here. The concerto is actually Aho’s second concertante piece for the trombone – his Symphony No. 9 (1994) included a substantial and very virtuosic solo part for the instrument. In that work, and even more so in the concerto, the composer’s aim has been to extend the expressive and virtuosic possibilities of the trombone. Composed around the same time, the Trumpet Concerto is scored for the wind section of a medium-sized symphony orchestra, plus two saxophones, baritone horn and percussion. It was given its premiere by the same musicians that perform it here, the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins supporting its principal trumpet Alain De Rudder in what is often a surprisingly jazzy work.

Known particularly for his orchestral output – 16 symphonies and 21 concertos to date! – the Finnish composer Kalevi Aho was recently described in Gramophone as having ‘a strong claim to the title of greatest living symphonist’. But as followers of the ongoing releases of his music on BIS will know, Aho has also composed a large number of works for smaller forces – quartets and quintets, duos and solo pieces. On the present disc, the Finnish pianist Sonja Fräki presents his output for solo piano, comfortably fitting on one disc, but nevertheless spanning some 30 years of a long career. The disc in fact opens with Aho’s earliest published work, the Nineteen Preludes from 1965-68, written before the composer had begun any formal studies of either composition or the piaNo.There is even a first version of Prelude No.8 dating from 1963, when Kalevi Aho was in his early teens and was just beginning to teach himself the piano, writing music intended mainly as practice pieces for his own use. Since then Aho has composed for other budding pianists – the Two Easy Piano Pieces for Children and the Sonatina – but as in much of his other music, the works for piano display his characteristic fascination with the virtuosic and technically brilliant side of music-making. On the present disc, this quality comes to the fore in the Sonata, with its sparkling first movement and percussive, toccata-like second movement followed by a searching Tranquillo molto, characterized by a trill which continues almost without interruption throughout the movement. Commissioned as a set piece for a piano competition, Solo II is likewise a challenge for any pianist, and forms part of a series of big (roughly ten-minute) solo works for various instruments, of which several have been recorded by BIS.

London in the early 1700s offered a dazzling mix of virtually every European musical style. This bustling environment attracted both students of music (such as the young Swedish composer Roman) and established musicians, eager to make their mark- Handel and Geminiani being two of the brightest shining stars. But new influences did not only come from across the Channel. The recent union between England and Scotland led to an increased cultural exchange, and English audiences were entranced by the rhythms and colours of the traditional tunes of Scotland. Various collections, such as the settings by the recorder virtuoso Francesco Barsanti, were published and even handel could not resist a few turns at the hornpipe in his Water Music. This state of affairs is reflected in the present mix of four baroque sonatas, by composers associated with London in various ways, and nine Scottish tunes in arrangements based on the Barsanti settings. This imaginative programme is characteristic of the approach adopted by Parnassus Avenue, an ensemble which is constantly challenging 'baroque standards': according to Parnassus Avenue there is no 'early' music, just a never-ending 'now'. In lending a John Stanley Adagio the same melancholy expressivity as the mournful Waly waly, and applying the same virtuosity to the hypnotic Clout the Cauldron as to a Handel Allegro, Dan Laurin and his colleagues also demonstrate that there are no genres, only one seamless musical whole. Corelli & Co., the group's previous CD on BIS, was hailed as 'a truly inspirational disc for anyone who regards the baroque original as a starting point for individual expression' in Early Music Review. Chances are that many will receive just as much inspiration from this new disc.