Joonas Ahonen

George Antheil called himself a ‘Pianist-Futurist’. A lover of speed, cars and aeroplanes, the American composer settled in the Paris of the Années Folles, where he frequented Picasso and Stravinsky, and composed works such as Sonate sauvage and Jazz Sonata, which caused a scandal: during a concert in Budapest, he even brandished a Chicago gangster-style pistol to restore silence in the hall … He hero-worshipped Beethoven, whose pieces he played in the first part of his recitals before moving onto his own music. In 1933, he returned to the United States where he met John Cage and Morton Feldman. Patkop and the young Finnish pianist Joonas Ahonen – whom The Times, following what the journalist described as ‘one of those concerts you remember for ever’, presented as the violinist’s ‘doppelgänger’! – pay tribute to the ‘Bad Boy of Music’.

Of the two large piano sonatas composed by Charles Ives, No. 2 (’the Concord Sonata’) is by far the best-known, overshadowing its sibling. The First Piano Sonata is comparably ambitious, however, and with a playing time of more than 40 minutes, similarly expansive. Like many works by Ives it had a long gestation period, beginning in 1901 with additions and revisions being made well into the 1920s. In contrast to the Concord, Ives didn’t provide the work with an explicit programme, but wrote that it was ‘mostly about the outdoor life in Connecticut villages in the 1880s and 90s.’ This can to an extent explain the various borrowings from hymns, but New York City, where Ives was living, has also left a clear mark with a liberal use of ragtime rhythms.

The Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord") of Charles Ives has tended to overshadow its predecessor, and it's no accident that pianist Joonas Ahonen chose to record that one first. The Piano Sonata No. 1, begun in 1901, represented an underappreciated breakthrough for Ives, even if he did continue to tinker with it into the 1920s. The work encompasses the polyphonic weaving of many strands of American music that would occupy Ives for much of his mature compositional life. Although the composer described it as inspired by "Impressions, Remembrances, & Reflections of Country Farmers in Conn.[ecticut] Farmland," it might better be described as a dialogue between country and city, with Protestant hymns set against and sometimes merged with a ragtime pulse as strong as any elsewhere in Ives' music.

The unifying idea of the concerto provides a way to get a handle on György Ligeti's experimental spirit, for a concerto here represents several fundamentally different things. The Cello Concerto of 1966, right at the height of Ligeti's exuberantly fearless adventures in 1960s Germany, might almost be called an anti-concerto, with the cello doing its best to hang on the edge of silence. Sample the very first movement, both for the precision of cellist Christian Poltéra's work at the low end of the dynamic spectrum and for the ideally clean engineering work by the BIS label, operating in a variety of Norwegian venues and mastering them, well, masterfully. The Chamber Concerto for 13 Instruments and the Melodien are essentially concertos for orchestra, with distinctive roles for each of the instruments, while the five-movement Piano Concerto, completed in 1988, is a fine and technically demanding example of Ligeti's later pulse-based, polyrhythmic style.

Arto Koskinen is a Finnish composer, pianist and harpsichordist who has devoted his musical life to establishing a dialogue between the Asian, European and Afro-American traditions. In the 1970s, he developed a passion for jazz, then went on to study Indian vocal music at a music and dance school in New Delhi. He also immersed himself in the study of polyphonic techniques from the Baroque era and sought to make them compatible with the melodic principles of oriental music. The result is this ‘Indian fugue’, composed between 1987 and 2000, whose main sources are North Indian classical music, traditional western polyphony and Afro-American improvisations. His compatriot Joonas Ahonen, a polymorphous pianist who has already recorded Le Monde selon George Antheil with Patricia Kopatchinskaja (ALPHA797), is a passionate advocate of Koskinen’s music. This monograph at last spotlights the music of a composer with a highly original voice.