Lindberg & Aho: Clarinet Concertos album review – Julian Bliss’s performances are immaculate

(Signum)With Taavi Oramo (also a clarinettist) conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony, Bliss is virtuosic in these two technically demanding but approachable concertosComposed just a few years apart, these impressive Finnish clarinet concertos were inspired by the playing of two of the finest clarinettists of our time, both Nordic. Magnus Lindberg’s concerto was composed in 2002 for his friend Kari Kriikku, while Kalevi Aho’s work was commissioned for the Swedish player Martin Fröst, who gave the first performance in London in 2006.In some respects, the two pieces are strikingly similar; both are cast in five movements, and both make enormous demands on the soloist, which include multiphonics, passage-work that requires fearsomely accurate articulation, and sustained passages in the highest, most treacherous register of their instruments. Both works are wonderfully approachable, though Aho’s work is the less adventurous, his orchestral writing more motoric, his gestures more rhetorical and fundamentally tonal than Lindberg’s, in which references to earlier clarinet solos, from Debussy to Gershwin, are cunningly secreted. Continue reading...

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