Period Living 2019

Liszt, according to the great British pianist John Ogdon, was responsible for ‘breaking the Germanic stranglehold on nineteenth-century composers, and scattering the seeds of modern music almost literally to the four winds. His music shows an avant-garde attitude to the problems of composing which was without parallel in the nineteenth century.’

In addition to its work with early music, Finnish Baroque Orchestra (FiBO) regularly commissions and gives premiere performances of works by living composers. The natural continuation of this work is the current disc, a document of just some of the music written for period instruments so far during the 2010s. The Helsinki Window disc, the second release in the FiBO Records series, offers a musical window into FiBO’s openminded approach to creating art, and it presents the rich world of contemporary music written for period instruments through four very different works by Jukka Tiensuu, Perttu Haapanen and Sarah Nemtsov.

The recorders heyday was the early Baroque period. In fact, until the 18th Century the recorder was known simply as flauto (flute), while the instrument we today call the flute bore the specific name flauto traverso (transverse flute), a confusion in terminology that has often led to compositions addressed to the recorder (flauto) being performed on modern flute. Der Fluyten Lust-Hof by Jacob Van Eyck is the most extensive collection of music for a solo wind instrument by a single composer, and a large portion of this set is devoted to a selection of highlights from this monumental work. Although written for amateur players, the compositions attest to the high standard of musicianship in Utrecht, with technical demands that are challenging even by modern standards. The recorders tonal purity and exceptional blend in ensemble makes it marvelously suited for adaptations of music originally written for other instrumental combinations. Examples from the early Italian repertoire include the Palestrina ricercar, capriccios by Frescobaldi and canzonas by Gabrieli, Merula and Trabaci.