MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


 REVIEW

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

alternatively
CD: AmazonUK AmazonUS
Download: Classicsonline


Kimmo HAKOLA (b. 1958)
Piano Concerto (1969) [56:14]
Sinfonietta (1999) [13:59]
Henri Sigfridsson (piano)
Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra/John Storgårds
rec. Tampere Hall, Tampere, December 2007. DDD
ONDINE ODE1127-2 [70:27]
Experience Classicsonline

Before playing this disc I had not heard anything by this Finnish composer. Hakola made his breakthrough with his 1986 First String Quartet.
 
The toweringly dominant work here is the nine movement piano concerto which plays five minutes short of an hour. According to Kimmo Korhonen's liner notes the concerto acts as an “observation terrace” from which can be viewed Hakola's various styles as they have evolved across the years.
 
The movements of the Piano Concerto are explosive and expostulatory. The Leifs-like Furioso marries dissonance and insistence. The Capricci is jazzy and eruptively discontinuous. It sounds a little like Nono and partakes something of Stravinsky as in his own Capriccio. Forza is an angry scree of rushing sound followed by a ripplingly machinistic toccata. There’s also more skeletal string-dominated fuoco which sounds a little like Bernard Herrmann in nightmare mode. There are jazzy gusts of piano solo and momentary slowings and accelerations. Cadenza is an exercise in rumpled and leonine Lisztian rhetoric. Maestoso is touched with gamelan. The tangle of ideas is endlessly fascinating and the whole thing is recorded with gripping address. Triste finds space for an oboe song in slow unwind and disclosure over a dripping piano pattern. At the end there is a stunningly spare brass fanfare with no drama about it yet it is deeply affecting. Lux is, in Korhonen's apposite words, a pianist's pilgrimage through a hall of mirrors. The whole landscape is crazed and fractured with shards hanging in mid-air, scattered on the floor and above and on either side and in front and behind.
 
From three years later comes the single movement shiver and shudder of the Sinfonietta. It is for the most part headlong and floods dominantly forward. It recalls the Americana of William Schuman – and what a revolutionary he was. It would play well alongside Schuman's big single movement pieces with drum asserted punctuation, hammered-out brass and rushing strings.
 
A prize for the domino-themed design of the foldout leaflet. It simultaneously manages stylish and legible. A triumph.
 
If you would like to explore further then there is more Hakola on Ondine: ODE1063-2 Clarinet Concerto; ODE 960-2 Clarinet Quintet.
 
The two works heard on the disc under review are given in what seem impressively accurate and clear performances.
 
Rob Barnett
 

 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.