This disc is my first encounter with Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), and I am sure it won’t be the last. This is music with big personality, intellectual and imaginative power. It is also virtually impossible to label. Here is a broadly traditional four-movement symphony, which ranges from lilting, almost tonal tunefulness to ferocious, harshly glittering dissonance in the space of a few bars. The range of mood and character is breathtaking: serenity alternates with violence, innocence meets grim experience head on. But the total effect is unlike that of anyone else. One never feels – as is sometimes the case with Schnittke – that the extremes are everything. There’s a persuasive symphonic thinking here too: a purposeful narrative of long-term tension and resolution, of seeking and finding. So after all, the humanist symphony still lives.
Admittedly I am not convinced by everything yet. Invoking Bruckner at the beginning of a long slow movement is dangerous – does Aho’s Adagio live up to that monumental exemplar? Only repeated hearings will tell. But this is music that invites the ear back to try again, and – as just two hearings have shown – it reveals more the deeper you probe. So, too, does the elemental orchestral fantasy Rejoicing of the Deep Waters – the music related to an opera Aho is currently writing. The playing of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra is excellent – both as an ensemble and as a team of soloists (Aho often stretches his section principals to the limits) – and Osmo Vanska shows again what a fine conductor he is: inspiring, galvanizing and a firm controller. First-class BIS recordings round off the experience. Well worth exploring – for those, that is, for whom listening is exploring.'