Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Eva Ollikainen – Bára Gísladóttir: Orchestral Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 46:32 minutes | 1,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dacapo
Bára Gísladóttir (b. 1989) considers sounds, instruments and ensembles as living organisms. In VAPE, Hringla and COR, the Icelandic composer and double bassist engages with the largest musical organism of all: the symphony orchestra. Inspired by death metal or techno as much as by Scelsi or Penderecki, the foreboding atmosphere of her music is cut through with irony, puns and black humour. After all, organisms themselves – especially human bodies – contain the potential for both comic excess and self-annihilation. In these three works we follow Gísladóttir’s fascination with language and coincidence; we hear an uncompromising interrogation of the body’s excesses and ailments; and, most of all, we see life, vaporous and between states, neither dark nor light.
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Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, Erkki Lasonpalo, Eva Ollikainen – Kalevi Aho: Timpani & Piano Concertos (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:17 minutes | 1006 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
There exist concertos for more or less all instruments, although those for solo timpani are among the rarest, and almost all of them were written in the 20th and 21st centuries. So the Timpani Concerto by Finnish composer Kalevi Aho (born 1949), a follower of Rautavaara and Boris Blacher, adds a welcome stone to the repertoire. Note that the work is performed here by the solo timpanist of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, Ari-Pekka Mäenpää. He uses five different timpanies, giving himself a range of around two octaves;as each timpani can – thanks to the pedal – cover a chromatic sixth interval. Far from limiting himself to the timpani’s rhythmical aspect, Aho gives full rein to its many melodic possibilities, and the many different shades and tones that the timpani offers. In the second part of the album, we can discover the First Piano Concerto by the same Aho, written in 1988 – let the listener be the judge of the evolution or revolution in the composer’s language. It is true that at points the concerto evokes Messiaen’s influence, and also the influence of Bartók – all in an energetic, modern and very lively language, which is based (according to the notes) on a complex numerology, which it isn’t necessary to understand – let’s say that it’s a personal specification of the writer’s – to enjoy the beauty and the joy in the work. Moreover, Aho doesn’t reject consonant harmonic minglings, or tonalities; his discourse is anything but serialist or inflexible. Might the final movement be an ornithological homage to Messiaen?
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Iceland Symphony Orchestra & Eva Ollikainen – Anna Thorvaldsdottir: ARCHORA – AIŌN (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:01:49 minutes | 1,95 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sono Luminus
The core inspiration behind ARCHORA centres around the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm – a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow – and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.
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