SKU: FG.55011-574-3

ISBN 9790550115743.

Kalevi Aho (b.1949) was only 18 years old when he completed his String Quartet no. 1 in g minor (1967). Nonetheless it was already the second one of its kind: the earlier string quartet in a minor got christened String Quartet No. 0 and banned from performing. The g minor quartet was heard the first time only 50 years after it was born, when the Kamus Quartet premiered it at the Musica Kalevi Aho Festival in Forssa on June 28, 2019. In Aho's home town, Forssa, it was not possible to study composition with a teacher: My model in this and the other works I composed while I was at school was all the mostly tonal music I had personally played on the violin or heard on the radio. The first movement, Moderato, begins in variation form, until followed by a fugue based on the variation theme. The initially lyrical second movement has a quick, virtuosic and light middle section. The third movement is a very quick scherzo that becomes dramatic, and the work ends with a chorale-like finale. The composer tells: When I got to study composition at the Sibelius Academy in autumn 1968 and showed the quartet to my teacher, Einojuhani Rautavaara, he said there was no point my studying tonal harmony and tonal formal constructions any longer; that I could do the exams in them straight away and start the courses in modern music resources there and then..

SKU: HH.HH369-FSP

ISBN 9790708041887.

This previously-unpublished Concerto a Quadro presumably started life as a concerto for the standard Baroque forces of flute, strings and continuo, now otherwise unknown; it is preserved in its surviving form for flute, violin, viola and cello in a set of manuscript parts apparently copied by an amateur musician in Sweden. Although unlikely to be the work of Handel, as a rare early example of music for flute quartet it is an attractive extension to a repertoire otherwise dominated by the works of Mozart and his contemporaries. In the present publication, editorial figuring in the cello part allows for the possibility of expanding the texture with additional continuo instruments.