Kari Kriikku & Anssi Karttunen - A Due (music for Clarinet and Cello)

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Kari Kriikku & Anssi Karttunen - A Due (music for Clarinet and Cello)

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At the very end of the 1980s, Anssi Karttunen and Kari Kriikku, old friends from their days at the Sibelius Academy, decided to commision works from all major Finnish composers for the then-usual combination of cello and clarinet. Sure enough, most composers agreed, and the two performers were even able to premiere the pieces in short order. It took 15 years, however, for Ondine to release the recording which Karttunen and Kriikku promised. I am not a fan of all the composers here, so I will limit my comments to four works.

Magnus Lindberg's "Steamboat Bill Jr." (1990) is an early major achievement of his mature period, where he returned to something resembling tonality and his works became centered around a chaconne process that help propel the music forward. The two instruments have very different personalities, with brief unity between them interrupted by lengthy spans of very engaging clowning around. All extended techniques are explored, and there's a lovely interlude where the cello plays harmonics that takes the music into a very different universe than the sections framing it. Lindberg was on top of his game in these years, producing highly caffeinated music full of zest, and this piece, with its Buster Keaton-inspired title, is not exception. If you like "Steamboat Bill Jr.", be sure to check out the orchestration of it, "Duo concertante", on an Ades disc. Unfortunately, the only extant performance of "Duo concertante" is by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Lindberg's music sounds somewhat less engaging when played by a French ensemble instead of his Finnish chums.

Kaija Saariaho wrote "Oi Kuu" (1990) in between the two halves of her orchestral diptych "Du cristal …a la fumee" (available on a must-have Ondine CD). Saariaho says her goal in the piece was to explore the points of contact between the two instruments. "The harmonies of the clarinet multiphonics, the cello multiple stops and colour transformations, the similarities and differences in articulation, the different colours in the same register." Anyone who likes Saariaho's work of this period, with its hushed and nocturnal tones, its lovely spectral transitions between the purest harmonies and noise, and its highly idiomatic writing for cello will be sure to like this piece. Needless to say, this recording by the dedicatees blows the performance by Alexis Descharmes (on an Aeon disc) away.

Kimmo Hakola's "Capriole" (1991) is one of the first pieces of his mature style, where modernist exhuberance is combined with a keen interest in the indigenous musical traditions of the world. It starts off with playful frolicking, where each instrument imitates phrases played by the other, reveling in their own unique timbres and capabilities for extended techniques. Towards the end, however, it veers into vague sounds from the steppes, reflecting the composer's recent discovery of Mongolian music. While I'm not sure this fusion is all that deep, I do find the piece quite entertaining.

In Jukka Tiensuu's "Plus II" (1992), the clarinet and cello play the same general lines, but with the slightest of delays, so that it appears that one instrument is shadowing the other. The mood throughout is cool and mysterious, with lots of microtonal inflections, a curious soundworld that is Tiensuu's alone. Lots of fun.

Christopher Culver @ Amazon.com