Danel

This six-disc boxed set offers a broad survey of a hundred years of Finnish chamber music, featuring more than sixty performers and twenty composers – between the late Romanticism of Toivo Kuula’s Piano Trio (1908) and the postmodernism of Veli-Matti Puumala’s String Quartet (1994). Highlights include songs by Aare Merikanto sung by Soile Isokoski, Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rilke song cycle, sung by Marcus Ullman, and Joonas Kokkonen’s third string quartet, performed by the Sibelius Quartet.

Jean-Luc Votano, principal clarinet of the Liège Royal Philharmonic (OPRL), here presents a work by a ‘classic’ figure of the twentieth century, the Kammerkonzert for clarinet, string quartet and string orchestra of Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1930), along with two compositions of the twenty-first: Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto, of which Votano gave the Belgian premiere with the OPRL, and Fantasme – Cercles de Mana by Johan Farjot. The latter work, scored for clarinet, viola, cello and orchestra, here receives its world premiere on disc before being performed to a concert hall audience. An album that admirably reflects the virtuosity and musicality of one of the OPRL’s principal soloists.