Kalevi Aho • Magnus Lindberg
Clarinet Concertos
Julian Bliss (clarinet); BBC Scottish SO/Taavi Oramo
Signum Classics SIGCD898 60:58 mins
Magnus Lindberg’s concertos are unconventionally conventional: whether it’s in his music for piano, trombone or, as here, clarinet, the Finnish composer pushes the soloist into a virtuosic stratosphere.
The 2002 Clarinet Concerto is now well established as a dazzling diamond in the repertoire rough, although few have recorded it since dedicatee Kari Kriikku won BBC Music Magazine’s Premiere Award in 2006. It’s exciting, then, to hear it taken up by Julian Bliss, a clarinettist who thrives in this scampering sound world. Lindberg’s language balances memorable melodic material with Gershwinian glissandi and piquant upper-octave phrases.
The cadenza is Bliss’s own; from its restrained opening to repeated ascents it is an extraordinary and engaging display – Mozart in modernity. The final fifth movement frolics with Rhapsody in Blue witticisms. (Lindberg lore reveals that’s the concerto was written while composer and Kriikku were holidaying on separate islands in the Gulf of Finland, with the work delivered by boat, page by page.)
Lindberg compatriot Aho’s concerto is an interesting coupling. While more introspective (BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Taavi Oramo are beautifully restrained in the Adagio), it is equally dramatic, drawing on an extended palette to broaden the clarinet’s sound. This is most effective in the Misterioso: where multiphonics creep into the score, the previously clean tonality cracks.
In his introductory note, Bliss says that the Lindberg and Aho clarinet concertos are ‘two of the greatest of the 21st century’. It’s a bold claim, and one that is easy to endorse.