Perttu Haapanen: Flute Concerto, Ladies' Room & Compulsion Island

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This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra focuses on works by Perttu Haapanen (b. 1972), one of the most important and interesting Finnish composers of his generation. It includes a recently-written Flute Concerto with Yuki Koyama as soloist and conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk, and two other works conducted by Hannu Lintu: a song-cycle written for soprano Helena Juntunen and an orchestral work, Compulsion Island, written for the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Compulsion Island was written to a commission from the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and makes full use of the resources of a full-sized symphony orchestra. Haapanen creates a multi-layered and richly sonorous texture where extended instrument techniques play a significant and carefully considered role. Beginning with the opening trumpet solo, there are several solo sections (for violin, clarinet, tuba, etc.) that appear as individual voices in the chaotic mental landscape of the ‘island’. Quiet, stagnant and expectant yet tense moments alternate with charged and punchy rhythmical passages that increase in force until the final culmination, followed by a subsiding, dreamlike and unreal epilogue.

The Flute Concerto lasts about 25 minutes and is in a single movement divided into two halves featuring different materials, according to the composer. At the surface level, it comes across as a flexible and elastic structure consisting of several short sections in rapid succession, with contrasting moods either alternating or superimposed. The palette of sonorities is rich, augmented by extended instrument techniques and a number of rare sound sources such as a typewriter producing crisp rhythms and the absurd sounds of wheezing toys. Haapanen wrote the concerto to a commission from the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, to be performed by the orchestra’s virtuoso Principal Flute, Yuki Koyama.

Ladies’ Room for soprano and chamber orchestra was written to a commission from the Musica nova Helsinki festival. Originally written and premiered in 2007 by Helena Juntunen, it was revised by Haapanen in the following year. The work is in a single movement but is actually a cycle of nine songs that are all sung without a break. The texts come from a wide variety of sources: poems by conductor and mezzosoprano Jutta Seppinen, the Bible, Google, the archives of Scotland Yard and Paul Celan. Between them are four nonsense text settings that pay homage to Adolf Wölfli, an early 20th-century Swiss artist. The soprano part is highly demanding due to its wide range of vocal techniques which make Ladies’ Room a vocal virtuoso work where the virtuoso component is an integral part of the content. © Ondine