Description
Sallinen; Takemitsu; PendereckiMusic for flute and orchestra Aulis Sallinen is among the best known contemporary Finnish composers. Born in Salmi in 1933, he studied composition with Arre Merikanto and Joonas Kokkonen at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and subsequently joined the teaching staff there, after serving for ten years as executive director of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. An award from the Finnish government in 1976 enabled him thereafter to devote his full attention to composition. He is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music and in 1983 was joint recipient, with Krzysztof Penderecki, of the Sibelius Prize of the Wihuri Foundation. Sallinen's compositions include five operas, ballets and a number of orchestral works, symphonies, concertos and sets of variations. His chamber music includes a number of string quartets. Sallinen's Concerto for flute and orchestra, Opus 70, commissioned by the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, was completed in 1995 and dedicated to the well-known flautist Patrick Gallois. The concerto, given the title Harlekiini, is scored for four string quartets, six brass-players and a number of wind and percussion instruments, the last placed mid-stage to give a stereophonic division between strings and brass. It is in four connected sections and opens with evocative orchestral sonorities, before the entry of the solo instrument into what are firmly tonal textures. To the orchestral chords the flute adds fragments of melody, based on recurrent figures and motifs, passed from soloist to orchestra. The Adagio section that follows harsh accompanying tone-clusters, offers an element of relative tranquillity, the flute solo now accompanied by dense orchestral chords and by a percussion counterpoint. The third section is introduced by the soloist, after the interweaving of the flute and solo violin line. Related material, sometimes angular in outline and often fragmentary in form, is passed between the participants, varying in mood from the meditative to the energetic, before a gong initiates the fourth and final section. Here a prolonged flute solo, suggesting a cadenza, leads to the return of the orchestra in all its varied instrumental colourings and to a conclusion that seems to leave much unsaid. The Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu provides a remarkable conjunction of East and West. He was largely self-taught, apart from some private study with Yosuji Kiyose, under whose auspices his first music was performed. In 1951 he joined Joji Yuasa and Kuniharu Akiyama in the Experimental Workshop (Jikken Kobo), an organization that aimed to bring together all the arts and offered a varied musical repertoire of contemporary composers. In the following decade he achieved wide recognition as a composer himself, influenced at first by contemporary French composers and then, from 1961, by John Cage. Over the years he won esteem, signalled by ma