Helena Åhman

Fresh from winning Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year in 2015 and the 2017 Peter Whittingham Jazz Award, emerging saxophonist Helena Kay releases her debut album, Moon Palace, on Ubuntu Music.

Estonian composer Helena Tulve (born 1972) is one of the brightest musical lights to emerge around the turn of the millennium. The first collection of her work was a remarkable debut, and its centerpiece, the massive Sula, deserves to be counted among the most monumental and original orchestral works of the first decade of the 21st century. While none of the pieces on this album quite match the impact of that piece, they each reveal a very fine musical intelligence and imagination and an ability to evoke a sense of the unpredictable, primordial processes of nature, particularly in frozen and desolate landscapes. Her works unfold with an organic logic that defies easy analysis but that feels inexorable and true. Each of these pieces lasts about 10 minutes. À travers, for chamber ensemble, and abysses, for flutes and chamber ensemble, do not use large forces, but both conjure up a sense of immense space, and like Sula, sound very, very cold. Much the same is true of Lijnen, which adds voice to the ensemble with aphoristic texts by Belgian poet Roland Jooris that confirm the tone of nature's icy and impersonal power that is evident in the music.

It is a truism that the organ, like no other instrument (even the piano), determines the impact of a piece of music which is played upon it. Conversely, however, the fact that not every work is suitable for every organ, is anything but trivial. For this immediately leads to questions around the connection between the instrument’s disposition and the compositional style, and what influence the choice of a specific instrument might have on the design of a programme.