Sibelius Chamber Music

The KAAÅS Trio was founded in 2011 by three Finnish musicians full of initiative. Annemarie Åström is well versed in Nordic music for the violin, an active events organiser and Artistic Director of the Wegelius Chamber Strings. The cellist, Ulla Lampela, is a member of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra and has produced hospital concerts in Helsinki for patients suffering from eating disorders, for psychiatric wards and for palliative care centres. Tiina Karakorpi, the pianist, has reaped major success in competitions and per-formed at prestigious concert venues around Europe. She is a constant advocate of equality in musical life, has recorded works by forgotten female composers and edited publications of their music.

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.

Vol. 2 in BIS' complete Sibelius Edition is given over the Finnish master's chamber music for strings and for strings and piano. Fifty years earlier, this release would've included only the "Voces intimae" string quartet. But BIS' 2007 release includes all four quartets and all four piano trios, plus 35 other works or substantial fragments lasting between 13 seconds to 32 minutes. One thing is instantly clear: Sibelius scholarship has made enormous strides since the mid-twentieth century.

It would be difficult to speak about the life and work of Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund without mentioning the name of his illustrious compatriot, composer Jean Sibelius—but the reverse is also true, as Berglund spent a lifetime exploring the profound depths of Sibelius's music and bringing it to an ever wider public. After three recordings of the complete Sibelius symphonies on CD, Berglund returned to these titanic works in 1998, aged nearly 70, with a level of insight—shaped over the course of decades—that perhaps no other conductor has ever achieved.

Both quartets on this disc are by composers who were not known for their chamber music, and in the case of Verdi, the E minor quartet stands completely outside his usual mode of composition. The Sibelius quartet, while it veers far from the well worn path of late-romantic chamber music, lies comfortably within its composer's milieu, with its angular harmonies, stark melodies, and overall enigmatic mood.

Englund is primarily regarded as a symphonic composer. His seven symphonies and his concertos are the backbone of a substantial output. The majority of his chamber works were composed fairly late, after he returned to composition following a ten-year period of silence. The exception, however, is the Piano Quartet composed in 1941 and slightly revised in the early 1970s.

Tallinn Chamber Orchestra’s album “Pēteris Vasks”. The publication includes two string concertos by Latvian-born composer Pēteris Vasks, the first of which is “Concerto No. 2 “Klātbūtne” for Cello and String Orchestra” – a three-part concerto for cello and string orchestra. Marko Ylönen will perform as a cello soloist on the recording. The second work on the album is the four-part “Concerto for Viola and String Orchestra” that features viola player Lilli Maijala as soloist. The orchestra is conducted by Juha Kangas.

Petteri, Juho and Samuli founded Sibelius Piano Trio a few years ago, and catapulted to success on the European concert stage. When three international soloists of this caliber unite to form a chamber music ensemble, the results are predictably electric. These three friends love playing together, and this love is easy to hear in their concerts and in their recording. Sibelius Piano Trio and Yarlung Records dedicated this album to Finlands 100th Anniversary.