Colin Currie / Lahti Symphony Orchestra / Dima Slobodeniouk KALEVI AHO Sieidi - Symphony No. 5

SIEIDI - SYMPHONY No. 5

Christoffer Sundqvist / Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra / Dima Slobodeniouk SEBASTIAN FAGERLUND Isola

Born in 1972, Sebastian Fagerlund was recently described on the website MusicWeb International as ‘yet another obscenely talented young musician from Finland’. The occasion was the release of his opera Döbeln, with a score that the reviewer went on to characterize as ‘both forward-looking and audience friendly’. Composed in 2009, Döbeln is Fagerlund’s first and so far only opera, and on the present disc we hear three orchestral scores. The musicians of the eminent Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra revel in the composer’s striking gift for orchestration, in performances supervised by the rapidly emerging young conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, who has collaborated with Fagerlund on several occasions previously. The clarinettist Christoffer Sundqvist is also well acquainted with Fagerlund’s music, and his playing served as inspiration for the composer as he wrote his colourful and eventful Clarinet Concerto. Following that work here is Partita, consisting of three movements with titles that mirror the composer’s concerns: Cerimonia (Ceremony), Risonanza (Resonance) and Preghiera (Prayer). According to Fagerlund himself, the work is not associated with any specific religion but rather with an inner, spiritual struggle in general; the need for everyone to find his or her own ‘prayer’. Closing the disc is Isola (Island) which sprang from a visit by the composer to an island in the Turku archipelago formerly used to segregate lepers and the mentally ill from the rest of society. On admittance inmates were expected to bring with them the wood for their own coffins, an ‘isle of the dead’ which today is an idyllic holiday location. A similar alternation of darkness and light, of movement and motionlessness, of violence and sensitivity, permeates Fagerlund’s tone poem.

Bram van Sambeek / Lahti Symphony Orchestra AHO & FAGERLUND Bassoon Concertos

The Finnish composer Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) and his younger colleague and compatriot Sebastian Fagerlund (b. 1972) have both received international recognition for their masterful treatment of large orchestral forces. This they have demonstrated in purely orchestral as well as in concertante works – Aho has written 26 concertos to date (most of them in his monumental project to compose a concerto for each of the main orchestral instruments), and Fagerlund’s concertos for clarinet and for violin have been released by BIS to critical acclaim. On this disc the two composers appear side by side with their respective concertos for bassoon and orchestra, works that to a certain extent illustrate different approaches to the concerto genre. If the Romantic concept of the concerto was that of a struggle between the soloist and orchestra, Fagerlund in his Mana (2014) instead gives the bassoon the role of a spiritual leader, conjuring up new sound worlds from the orchestra. (In Swedish – Fagerlund’s mother tongue – ‘mana’ is a verb that suggests invocation; in Finnish the word alludes to exorcism). Kalevi Aho, on the other hand, has endeavoured to enrich and expand the solo instrument’s sonic and expressive possibilities through his use of orchestration and describes his concerto as ‘quite symphonic in character’. In both works Lahti Symphony Orchestra supports the soloist Bram van Sambeek, the first bassoonist ever to receive the prestigious Dutch Music Prize and the musician for whom Fagerlund composed Mana. In preparation for the concerto Fagerlund also wrote the solo piece Woodlands, which van Sambeek includes here together with Aho’s dramatic Solo V. (BIS Records)