Composed just a few years apart, these impressive Finnish clarinet concertos were inspired by the playing of two of the finest clarinettists of our time, both Nordic. Magnus Lindberg’s concerto was composed in 2002 for his friend Kari Kriikku, while Kalevi Aho’s work was commissioned for the Swedish player Martin Fröst, who gave the first performance in London in 2006.
In some respects, the two pieces are strikingly similar; both are cast in five movements, and both make enormous demands on the soloist, which include multiphonics, passage-work that requires fearsomely accurate articulation, and sustained passages in the highest, most treacherous register of their instruments. Both works are wonderfully approachable, though Aho’s work is the less adventurous, his orchestral writing more motoric, his gestures more rhetorical and fundamentally tonal than Lindberg’s, in which references to earlier clarinet solos, from Debussy to Gershwin, are cunningly secreted.
Julian Bliss’s performances of both works, with Taavi Oramo (a clarinettist himself) conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, are absolutely immaculate. It’s clear from the opening moments of the Lindberg concerto that the most extreme technical demands hold no terrors for him, and he matches that virtuosity with a velvety smooth tone in the lyrical passages in both works. Perhaps Kriikku’s recording of the Lindberg has a shade more intensity than Bliss’s, but it’s a close-run thing.
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