Beyond the Light and Darkness

SKU: FG.55011-485-2

ISBN 9790550114852.

Mental pictures inspired by the surrounding and the poet Emily Dickinson's verses are often tinged with Nieminen's works. Nieminen describes his second quartet, as follows: The quartet was created out of the need to describe childhood memories and in distinction to polar nights. The conception of time is present in both of them. Mental pictures turning to the past and the stillness of polar nights in the darkness of which time goes and the amount of light increases without noticing it..

SKU: FG.55011-372-5

ISBN 9790550113725.

Images of the sea figure prominently throughout my life and memories: from holidays on the Atlantic coast during my Canadian childhood to my current Baltic home, and the imagined, only later experienced Mediterranean of my ancestral heritage. As an immigrant (son of an immigrant) bound to two northern countries, the sea is emblematic of my twin homelands, from the expanses of water surrounding them to those separating them. A Mari usque ad Mare. The sea is also an enduring image of the unknown, of expanses unexplored, of the raw power of nature and, for too many currently, of terror holding a hope of refuge - or the pain of loss.
Such disparate ideas were captured for me in the seascapes of the New York painter MaryBeth Thielhelm, whom I met in 2008 during a residency on the Gulf of Mexico. Her vast, abstract, nearly monochromatic depictions of imaginary seas in wildly varying moods were the catalyst for a concerto where the piano is frequently far from a hero battling a collective, but rather acts as a channel for elemental forces surging up from the orchestra, floating - sometimes barely so - on its constantly shifting surface. There are few themes to speak of, beyond a handful of iconic ideas that periodically cycle upward. Rather, the piano's material is largely an ornamentation of the more primal rhythmic and harmonic impulses from the orchestra below - a poetic interpretation, if you will, of the more immediate experience of facing the vastness of some unknown body of water.
The title Nameless Seas is borrowed from one of Thielhelm's exhibitions, as are those of the four movements, which are bridged together into two halves of roughly equal weight - one rhapsodic and free, the other more single-minded and direct, separated only by a short breath. The opening movement, Nocturne, is predominantly calm, if brooding, darkness and light alternating throughout. Lyrical arabesques sparkle over gently lapping cross-currents in the strings and mirrored timpani, the piano's full power only rarely deployed. The waves gradually build, drawing in the full orchestra for a meeting of forces in Land and Sea, a brighter, more warmly lyrical scene that unfolds in series of dreamlike, sometimes even nostalgic visions, which for me carry strong memories of sitting on rocks above surging Atlantic waves. The third movement, Wake, is a fast, perpetual-motion texture of glinting, darting rhythms and sudden shafts of light, with a prominent part for the steel drums, limning the piano's quicksilver figurations. An ecstatic climax crashes into a solo cadenza that grows progressively calmer and more introspective rather than virtuosic. Much of the tension finally releases into Unclaimed Waters, a drifting, meditative seascape in which the piano is progressively engulfed by a series of ever-taller waves, ultimately dissolving into a tolling, rippling continuum of sound.
It has been a great privilege to realize such a long-held dream as this piece, and to write it for not one, but two great pianists. Risto-Matti Marin and Angela Hewitt, both of whose friendship and support have been unfailing and humbling, share the dedication. Nameless Seas was commissioned by the PianoEspoo festival and Canada's National Arts Centre, with the premieres in Ottawa and Helsinki led by Hannu Lintu and Olari Elts. Thanks are due also to the Jenny and Antti Wihuri fund, whose generous grant provided me with much-needed time, and Escape to Create in Seaside, Florida, the source to which I returned to do a large part of the work.

SKU: PR.416413010

UPC: 680160605682.

Under the Sun's Gaze as a title for a musical composition conjures up many possibilities. It is, in fact, an imagined line from an unwritten poem, invented with the idea of capturing something of the visual aura the sounds and energy of this work invoke in its composer' mind. An omnipotent presence in all of nature, a source of life yet also capable of its destruction, the sun affects the light and dark in our physical existence as it defines the daily and seasonal life. The music of this work, in three interlocking parts, takes turns being exuberant, caressing, scorching, receding, hazy, lazy, blazing, dissolving into darkness, blinding in its intensity. Subtitled Concerto da Camera III, this work is written for what has become known as the standard Pierrot instrumentation of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano plus percussion. The difference here is that the winds are doubled - the two flutists alternating with piccolo and alto flute and both clarinetists also doubling on bass clarinets. The ninth member of the ensemble, a soprano saxophone, appears well into the piece, its lyrical, plaintively expressive quality dominating the musical terrain for a while. While occasionally joining the others for some tutti outbursts, it maintains its position as something of a guest throughout. Of the various thematic ideas that populate this work, a six-note descending line played by the clarinet appearing right at the work's opening then arching back up reveals itself, as the music unfolds, to be the principal melodic building block of Under the Sun's Gaze. Its various transformations include the plaintive soprano saxophone melody appearing in the middle section. Just under 20 minutes in length, the work in its totality can be heard as being in a loose arch form, its ending receding into a distant darkening horizon which carries in it the seed of the new dawn that lies beyond. Under the Sun's Gaze was commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress for the San Francisco Contemporary Players, David Milnes, conductor.