SKU: FG.55011-508-8

ISBN 9790550115088.

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: HL.14019938

Postcards was written in 1991 for the Vega Wind Quintet, who first performed it at the Huddersfield Festival in the same year. It is a reworking of a set of eight Bagatelles written in 1965: each movement has been rewritten and enlarged to a greater or lesser extent. The title was chosen to emphasise the nature of the pieces, which are in a sense brief postcards from different genres (fugato, dance, etc).

John McCabe (1939-2015) was a British composer, pianist and music administrator. He studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music and built a career as a virtuoso pianist. However, he also wrote several hundred musical compositions,ranging from large-scale orchestral works to chamber music and solo instrumental pieces - it is said the only classical genre he did not write for was opera.