Some fine moments, but overall not Hakola's best
Christopher Culver | 05/21/2009
(3 out of 5 stars)
"Kimmo Hakola is finally being recognized as one of Finland's most distinctive composers. It's taken long enough. Born in 1958, Hakola belongs to the same generation as Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen, but he got a later start. His first big work was his String Quartet of 1986, and just when he made a name for himself with this successful modernist masterpiece, he went on a long creative hiatus. When he reappeared in the 1990s, his idiom had moved towards an integration of global indigenous musics, from Mongolia to Klezmer, combined with a highly caffeinated sense of musical motion.
The Piano Concerto (1996) was one of Hakola's first efforts in this new style, and at 55 minutes it remains his longest concert piece. It is divided into nine movements featuring a variety of moods. There's a great deal of humour in the piece, with the pianist often parodying 1950s serialist works for the instrument, and at one point an organ apes the piano. The climax, however, curiously brings these bleep-bloop echoes of Darmstadt together with radiantly Romantic orchestral music. Folk or faux-folk music inflections appear from time to time, though nowhere near as much as in other pieces of the era. Unfortunately, this kitchen sink approach to the piano concerto doesn't work. The rich collection of allusions in, say, the clarinet concerto of five years later, don't stop the work from seeming a tight coherent whole. But in the piano concerto, this pastiche just goes on and on, and a lot of the work doesn't involve the piano at all but is just orchestral noodling. I'm honestly baffled that Hakola didn't retract the work and spend some time trimming it.
The Sinfonietta (2000) is a single-movement toccata for orchestra, a bundle of melodies played at furious speed. This is a fun piece for about the first 5 minutes of its 15-minute length, but as a whole it seems a pretty generic modernist orchestral work, with nothing especially memorable or insightful.
While I don't rate Kimmo Hakola as highly as certain other Finnish composers, his music is generally entertaining and it has a great deal of wit. This Ondine disc unfortunately doesn't portray his talents in the best light. For those who have not yet heard his music, I'd recommend getting an earlier Ondine disc with his clarinet concerto."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1