FMQ - FMQ 2017 Articles

Princess Cecilia - Charmingly eclectic

Väinö Raitio (1891–1945) was one of Finland’s musical modernists in the 1920s – praised but unperformed until the last couple of decades. Nowadays, his colorful orchestral works have become the focus of growing interest. This year, the Helsinki Festival started its concert programme with a one-of-a-kind performance of Raitio’s first full-length opera, Princess Cecilia (1933) – previously performed 81 years ago.

Hanna Isolammi

August 24, 2017

Features

Inspiring upper secondary education comes with music

Many of today’s Finnish professional musicians attended the Sibelius Upper Secondary School in Helsinki. In addition to general education and musical & dance tuition, the school provides contacts, networks and encounters.

Heidi Horila

August 11, 2017

Reviews

Blowing and popping bubbles

The Time of Music 2017 festival in Viitasaari took a broad-based look at the theme of Art & Autonomy. There was also discussion about social bubbles within the contemporary music culture. Yet bubbles too can be looked at from various perspectives, writes Merja Hottinen.

Merja Hottinen

August 4, 2017

Features

More real than reality

Composer Ville Raasakka creates hyper-realistic music using sources ranging from individual sounds collected in everyday life to entire concerts. His work Hypermarket and hypercommodity for shopping items, piano and chamber orchestra highlights the utter insanity of consumerism.

Hanna Isolammi

June 28, 2017

Columns

Jovanka Trbojević in memoriam

Composer Lotta Wennäkoski reminisces about her friend, the composer Jovanka Trbojević, who passed away in May [2017].

Lotta Wennäkoski

June 22, 2017

Features

The kantele - outside the box

Today, the kantele inspires composers and performers across genre boundaries. Musician Maija Kauhanen and composer Adina Dumitrescu discuss the instrument from their respective perspectives.

Tove Djupsjöbacka

June 16, 2017

Reviews

The complete set

The music on Jukka Eskola Soul Trio's album is straightforward, stylish and groovy Soul Jazz, almost directly from the 60s. However, the discerning listener will find details with a more recent time stamp.

Jan-Erik Holmberg

June 8, 2017

Reviews

Bop goes cool

Jukka Perko Tritone moves the onetime fierce music of Dizzy Gillespie to somewhat gentler realms, still not losing the original ideas and logics of the songs.

Jan-Erik Holmberg

June 8, 2017

Reviews

Strong solo piano

It can take a while before you realise that Heikki Sarmanto actually is playing an old standard song. That’s why it is both an under- and overstatement to simply say that Sarmanto plays standards on his solo piano twofer CD.

Jan-Erik Holmberg

June 8, 2017

Reviews

The legacy continues

Holding a mirror up to the past can be burdensome. But it can also be a revelation. Both applied to trumpeter Verneri Pohjola as he took the bull by the horns last year and interpreted his father’s music at the Viapori Jazz Festival and at the Tampere Jazz Happening. No mean feat, as Pekka Pohjola (1952—2008) remains one of the revered icons of the 1970s European prog rock scene. The stakes were high but Verneri pulled the concerts off with flying colours.

Petri Silas

June 8, 2017

Reviews

Tender, edgy free jazz

Since 2005, Black Motor has been a proudly local Tampere institution, making its own idiosyncratic way apart from the orthodox Helsinki scene.

Wif Stenger

June 8, 2017

Reviews

Saariaho’s earthy colours

The distinguished Meta4 string quartet's second volume of Saariaho's chamber music was released in 2016. At the heart of this album are two larger works: ...de la Terre (1991) for violin and electronics and Terra Memoria (2006) for string quartet.

Anna Pulkkis

May 17, 2017

Reviews

Nordgren’s Rites of Passage

Pehr Henrik Nordgren’s music often has a ritual, pictorial quality that generates a powerfully disturbing sense of atmosphere, of foreboding, as this album perfectly illustrates.

Martin Anderson

May 17, 2017

Reviews

Insightful and intense Liszt and Schubert

Marin’s performance points up the intricate voice-leading and ensures that everything is heard, lucid and emotionally vivid. Indeed, emotional flow might be described as the scarlet thread of this entire album.

Mats Liljeroos

May 17, 2017

Reviews

Minnesotan Memories of Migration

This double album is the issue of three concerts given in Minnesota in February 2016, and Olli Kortekangas’ Migrations was a commission for that occasion. Migrations must have caused many in its initial audiences to reflect upon their own origins, and it retains its ability to touch the heart in this recording.

Martin Anderson

May 17, 2017

Reviews

Magical Nordic string trios

Not an easy listening disc by any means, but a magical compilation that grows on you with repeated listening, not least because of the superb performance given by Trio Aristos.

Mats Liljeroos

May 17, 2017

Reviews

Tüür’s Integration of Energies

The two clarinet concertos in this album demonstrate Tüür’s ability to suggest huge tectonic forces at work under dancing or drifting textures in higher instrumental registers.

Martin Anderson

May 17, 2017

Reviews

Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha

When Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä Raha came on stage in the Horta Hall of Bozar in Brussels, as part of the 11th edition of Balkan Trafik!, they must have realised it was not going to be an easy victory. The folding chairs for the audience had been placed at the far end of a huge empty dance floor, some thirty metres from the stage. To compensate for this they moved into gear right from the very start, and delivered what could be expected from them: energetic and exciting Balkan music with a subtle twist.

Ton Maas

May 11, 2017

Features

Multiple modes of music education in Nepal

How does one organise arts education in a multi-ethnic society? Whose culture should be taught? What should be considered in drawing up a national curriculum for music? The Finnish-Nepalese-Israeli project Global Visions Through Mobilizing Networks is contributing to the development of music education in Nepal.

Lari Aaltonen

May 5, 2017

Features

Roots of rhythm

Helsinki-Cotonou Ensemble fuses West African rhythms to an array of jazz, funk and rock for a high-energy sound that appeals to heart, head and feet. Born in Benin in 2009, the band has won fans with high-energy live shows on three continents.

Wif Stenger

April 20, 2017

Features

Composing is for everyone

Composing is acquiring an important role at Finland’s music institutes and schools. In the revised curricula, composing is identified as an activity that is – or at least should be – accessible to everyone and whose positive impacts extend far beyond the realm of music itself.

Anu Ahola

April 13, 2017

Reviews

Terrorist threats and wry humour

The drama emerges from the everyday conversations of the Judge’s family but expands in the viewer’s mind – thanks in no small part to Talvitie’s powerful music, reflecting horrors in its shrieking noises, dissonances and nightmarish repetitions.

Harri Kuusisaari

April 6, 2017

Features

Santtu-Matias Rouvali: Conductor on the Cusp

After a string of debuts with renowned orchestras, Santtu-Matias Rouvali is about to take up two significant new positions. Andrew Mellor met him to discuss psychology, leadership and Finland’s musical future.

Andrew Mellor

March 30, 2017

Features

The bourgeois modernist

Väinö Raitio was a Modernist Finnish composer whose works were received with considerable reservations in his lifetime. Today, Raitio’s music is interesting both because of the period in which it was written and because of its artistic quality. Pluralism has rehabilitated Raitio, and music historians no longer need to adhere to the dramatic martyrdom conventionally ascribed to him.

Hanna Isolammi

March 14, 2017

Features

Discords in the national melody

Independent Finland is 100 years old and has a classical music scene that is diverse, pluralist and multicultural. A century ago, the situation was very different: just as the nation was heavily polarised after the bitter Civil War, musical life was similarly divided. It is not too much of a simplification to identify two musical camps: official national neo-Romanticism and “left-wing” modernism.

Hanna Isolammi

March 14, 2017

Reviews

Frigg - Live at De Doelen, Rotterdam

According to the festival programme, Frigg, a band from Finland that made their first Dutch appearance at the Celtic & Balfolk Night in Rotterdam on 18 February, “sometimes sound like a polka band, sometimes like a Riverdance troupe and sometimes even like a rock band”. And they did, even though they didn’t show their rough and edgy side right from the start.

Ton Maas

March 7, 2017

Columns

Finland is finally pop

Finland has become, among other things, a land of pop. Technology is the major contributor to this development: music is more readily available than ever and easier to produce than ever. Finland’s hottest trending performer at the moment is Alma, who has 50 million Spotify streams to her credit.

Oskari Onninen

March 6, 2017

Columns

Free the Kalevala from Finnishness!

"The Kalevala myth was a genuine source of inspiration for the fledgling Finnish nation in search of an identity. But has it been such a thing any more, really, since the Second World War?," asks Kimmo Hakola in his Kalevala day column.

Kimmo Hakola

February 28, 2017

Reviews

Spaces for inspiration

We have come a long way from the days when audiences at concerts of contemporary music consisted of a tiny handful of dedicated professionals. This was the inevitable conclusion when looking at the size and structure of audiences at this year’s Musica nova Helsinki festival. There were several concerts where people actually had to be turned away, and the audience base ranged far beyond the diehard contemporary music enthusiasts.

Merja Hottinen

February 21, 2017

Features

Keyboardist Kari Ikonen: “We take risks every night”

Seamlessly, keyboardist and composer Kari Ikonen spins a distinctive sound of his own that draws on music from around the world, grounded in US jazz and fusion of the ‘60s and ‘70s. On Moog synthesizer, acoustic or electric piano, he plays with ecstasy and a fascination with rhythm.

Wif Stenger

February 14, 2017

Features

Music education in the Sámi homeland

The theory is that goal-oriented art education in Finland is provided for all residents nationwide, at school and through government-subsidised institutions. But in the Sámi homeland in the far north of Finland this is not always the case. In the field of music, this failing is being addressed through the Sámi music adult education project, supported by the European Social Fund.

Tove Djupsjöbacka

February 7, 2017

Reviews

The voice in focus

Ulla Pirttijärvi’s second album with the Ulda trio is a well-balanced whole. She stays surprisingly close to the luohti or yoik tradition, combining lyrics and wordless sequences in a very traditional way.

Tove Djupsjöbacka

February 7, 2017

Reviews

Festivals with a personal touch

A few years ago two new events, the RUSK festival in Pietarsaari, founded by composer Sebastian Fagerlund and clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist, and Pasimusic, composer Pasi Lyytikäinen’s own festival in northern Savo, appeared on the autumn festival map of Finland, brightening up the darkening months with their innovative offerings.

Merja Hottinen

January 31, 2017

Columns

Representing ethnicity in music

Is it OK for a Finn of the majority population to put on a fake Sámi costume bought in a joke shop and perform a Sámi yoik? Or to put on a feather headdress and dance a Native American dance? Where do we draw the line between cultural interaction and cultural appropriation?

Lari Aaltonen

January 25, 2017

Features

New start for Musica nova

Finland’s largest contemporary music event, Musica nova Helsinki, isn’t the product of one person’s vision, or even one organisation’s. It is an ecosystem that draws and depends upon most of Helsinki’s major musical institutions, which might explain why the German conductor André de Ridder was an astute choice to be the festival’s new artistic director.

Andrew Mellor

January 17, 2017