The most played concerto by a Finnish composer is…
main…. obviously, Sibelius’s violin concerto.
But what’s the second most performed?
We think you’ll never guess.
Clue #1 It’s by a living composer
# 2 It’s for percussion and orchestra
# 3 It’s being performed 15 times in 2017-18. By three different soloists: Colin Currie, Martin Grubinger and Alexei Gerassimez.
Any warmer?
The composer is the chap on the left.
*
Kalevi Aho’s percussion concerto will have its 50th performance this year. That makes it #2 behind Sibelius.
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Kalevi Aho ??
I’m sure I’m not the only one who guessed this. Aho is one of the best living composers. His Insect Symphony, for example, is magnificent.
Although I got very itchy after a performance of that piece.
Sally
The person pictured on the right in the photo is contrabassoonist Lewis Lipnick of the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, DC), I think.
Is that an Austrian lodenmantel he’s wearing?
Nothing wrong with that, just wondering.
I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it looks like something “Central European,” broadly speaking.
Yes, Mr. Guerrero, I am wearing a lodenmantel..from a shop in Erding, Bayern. Made in Bavaria.
Lapnick commissioned a contrabassoon concerto from Aho, which he then recorded (I think with Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic). Though the NSO has never, to my knowledge, played it, which seems like a missed opportunity.
I do like Aho’s clarinet concerto, which I heard the incomparable Martin Frost play with the NSO several years ago.
Yes, indeed, that is me (Lewis Lipnick) with Kalevi Aho in Helsinki a few years ago during the summer music festival.
I was surprised to see Aho’s Flute Concerto performed recently by the mediocre local orchestra in my Eastern European city. The ensembles here almost entirely avoid anything from recent decades, not because of a fear of alienating audiences with modernist stuff but because the fees to perform work under copyright are simply too high to bear. So, I can only assume that Aho’s publisher Fennica Gehrman is being unusually flexible on performance fees in order to get Aho’s work wider exposure.
Robert van Bahr, the owner of BIS, told me that he can’t sell many copies of Aho in Japan because of what that word means in Japanese.
I do think that Aho is one of the better, more clever living composers. My favorite among living composer is Jennifer Higdon, who might be a bit too conservative for some. But who asked me!
Ahi Tuna?
Kenkyusha’s Japanese-English dictionary:
Aho (n): a fool; an ass; a jackass; a simpleton
I think George Enescu faced similar “challenges” in Paris because of his name, which he changed to Georges Enesco (something about the suffix on the last name which is problematic in the French language, evidently) …
I worked for a Japanese company many years.Our business cards were printed in English on one side and in Katakana phonetic Japanese on the other. Unfortunately one of my co-workers name in Katakana translated to the very forbidden “C” word in Hiragana. He always got either snickers or stares when he presented his business card to our Japanese visitors.