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
Henri Sigfridsson
(piano) 
