SKU: FG.55011-509-5

ISBN 9790550115095.

Kimmo Hakola's Wind Quintet op. 96 (2017) was commissioned by the Kimito Island Music Festival. The composer sees that making the ensemble ultimately breathe and express itself as an organic, coherent subject should be the aim in composing for wind quintet. The normal chamber-music configuration is not a sufficient basis for me in composing a wind quintet: the instruments have to be compressed, reduced, even crushed together so that, in pairs and different combinations, they produce new, viable audio units. Collision often generates something new. Kimmo Hakola has gone through a number of styles and influences in his career as a composer, his idiom expanding at times to embrace Romanticism, Orientalism and klezmer. He has attained international recognition with an output that spans various genres from intimate solo works to full-length operas such as La Fenice (2011) commissioned by the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Many of his works are expansive and epic: his Piano Concerto (1996), for instance, clocks in at 55 minutes. Hakola says that he sees music as drama. His dramas explore almost Shakespearean extremes, from moments of raging sound and fury and violent battles to quiet moments of meditation and heart-rending monologues.

SKU: ST.Y290

ISBN 9790220223228.

Winner of the 2011 Stainer & Bell Award for Brass Composition held at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Timothy Wilson's Avidity is a dynamic endorsement of the competition's aim to provide exciting new brass music for schools, conservatoires and professional ensembles. Generated by the composer's skilful invention and purposeful structure, its fast-moving six-minute sonata form for brass quintet delivers the musical counterpart of the eagerness and expectancy implied by its title.

In the outer sections of Avidity strongly accented rhythms command the attention, with arresting unisono phrases balanced by effervescent staccato passages. The level of energy is sustained through unexpected rhythmic twists and turns distorting the pulse of the music, with striking crescendi and strong dynamic contrasts that are a particular strength of the brass idiom. There is respite however, with two episodes of solemn, chorale-like material whose arched lines sound no less well on the five instruments. But the last word is with the opening theme, returning with unstoppable momentum and concluding Avidity with a decisive cadence of abrupt repeated chords.