Chinese Songs

The Finnish contemporary composer Kalevi Aho's (b. 1949) fourth symphony from 1972-73 is here coupled with the composer's song cycle "Kiinalaisia lauluja" ("Chinese songs" - sung in Finnish, beautifully performed by Tiina Vahevaara) from 1997.This is contemporary music with a remarkable high musical quality and expressive impact - it is no wonder that Aho is regarded being Finland's leading composer of today. Because these two works are indeed original, deeply moving, powerful, and memorable……..

L. Johan @ Amazon.com

Finnish composer Kalevi Aho’s Fourth Symphony (1972) contains, in its three movements, elements both typical of his early work and prophetic of things to come. The first movement’s fugal exposition reveals a continuation of that concern with musical shape and form already quite evident in Aho’s previous symphonies. His skillful use of counterpoint to convey an impression of sadness or dread echoes that great master of creepy fugue writing, Bartók. The second movement unleashes a violent whirlwind of sound very much in the spirit of Mahler’s or Shostakovich’s more nihilistic moments, and its instrumental virtuosity very much anticipates the composer’s most recent, concertante-style symphonic writing.

Gary Lucas – charmingly oddball pop songwriter, musical world traveler, utterly hellacious guitarist – is perhaps at his most hellaciously, charmingly cosmopolitan on this frankly amazing album, which finds him adapting popular Chinese songs that were originally recorded in the 1960s and which he heard and fell in love with during a sojourn in Taiwan in the mid-'70s. His girlfriend at the time had a cassette tape of such local superstars as Chow Hsuan and Bai Kwong, and it was, he says in his liner notes, "like almost no other music I had ever heard before." Twenty-five years later he put together this quirkily gorgeous tribute, which includes jaw-droppingly virtuosic fingerstyle guitar arrangements ("Mad World," "Wall") and song settings using guest vocalists. Among the best of the latter are the limpidly beautiful "Night in Shanghai" (again, note the guitar playing) and the country-flavored "I Wait for Your Return," which is simply a hoot. He's not playing this stuff for laughs, though; his genuine affection for the music comes through loud and clear, and even when he has fun with it he is obviously trying to do so in a way that brings its haunting loveliness to the fore. Very highly recommended.