Jaakko Mäntyjärvi

"Mäntyjärvi makes such full use of the potential of the choral sound and the registers of the human voice in his harmonies that the colours begin to flicker like the Northern lights, superbly enriching the text."

His music is constantly being performed abroad. In Finland, he is known as a composer of choral music and an active singer. Regular readers of FMQ will recognise him as one of our house translators. Jaakko Mäntyjärvi is something of a musical outlier.

"The work that seems to be doing the international diplomacy is Mäntyjärvi's Four Shakespeare Songs of 1984, one of his earliest surviving works (he withdrew several earlier scores), and as soon as one encounters its opening number, 'Come Away, Death', one understands why: it has that rare capacity in a piece of music of making you think you must always have known it."