Musica nova Helsinki

Janne Nisonen

Conductor Janne Nisonen is one of the most versatile musicians of his generation, performing as a conductor, leader, violin soloist and chamber musician. He began his violin studies at the age of four in Kokkola, Ostrobothnia and went on to study at the Sibelius Academy and Edsberg Chamber Music Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Later he studied conducting with Hannu Lintu and Atso Almila at the Sibelius Academy.

Nisonen has conducted among others the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. In autumn 2016, he was nominated as the chief conductor of Pori Sinfonietta. Janne Nisonen has been the 1st leader of the Tapiola Sinfonietta since 2007 and has appeared as a guest leader with many European orchestras. He has made numerous recordings and is a regular guest on music festivals abroad. In 2008 Nisonen and his colleagues founded the Jousia string ensemble. Since the beginning this small ensemble has excited audiences and critics abroad.

RAGE Thormbones

RAGE Thormbones is an American experimental new music duo. Both artists, Mattie Barbier and Weston Olencki, are classically trained trombonists. Their low-frequency sound, resonance and tones bring together brass instruments, electronic synthesis, and amplification.

Mattie Barbier is a musician and sonic researcher focused on experimental intonation, noise, and physical processes of instruments. Barbier teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and at Los Angeles City College and has been described as a "diabolically inventive trombonist-composer”.

Weston Olencki performs as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, organs, and various electronic media. Much of his recent work deals with relationships between experimental sound, geography, and American vernacular traditions. It has been said that his music is ”like a time machine that leads the listener through the history of bluegrass, sound recording techniques, and the radio”. Olencki has been a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts and held residencies at universities of Harvard, New York, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford and Northwestern.

Jimmy López Bellido: Synesthésie

Jimmy López Bellido (b. 1978) is one of the most highly-acclaimed composers of his generation. He studied both in his native Peru, in Helsinki, and in masterclasses with a host of celebrated composers. Synesthésie (2011) was commissioned by Radio France and in 2012 won first prize in the Nicola de Lorenzo composition competition in the USA. Its five movements address the five human senses and synesthetic experiences, i.e. seeing notes, numbers or letter as colours. Four of the movements each use only one section of the orchestra. The first is touch (timpani), the second smell (strings), the third taste (woodwinds) and the fourth hearing (brass and metal percussions). Of the fifth the composer says: “I chose the word vision instead of sight because it also suggests a state of revelation, which is the effect that I seek to generate when all instrumental groups finally play together. Furthermore, this movement reveals the harmonic structure of the piece in a very transparent way.”

Carla Iannotta: where the dark earth beds

Says Clara Iannotta, born in Rome in 1983 but nowadays living in Berlin: “My music has always been an intimate investigation of the self. Sound has the power to reach depths which words cannot; it taught me who I was; and who I was becoming. In 2020, I got sick, and I was forced to change. Instead of composition feeling like a sometimes difficult, but focused, process of investigation, I felt lost. I know that I cannot write the same music I used to, but I don’t know who I am yet or what my music will be.”

where the dark earth bends for two trombones and orchestra is, she adds, “about everything and nothing. It gathers scraps from somewhere in my future, beyond the curve of what I know. Reaching out of sight, I’ve collected possibilities that might be mine, or might be someone else’s, digging for a harvest that makes no sense. A very important thanks goes to Weston Olencki and Mattie Barbier, who co-wrote their solo parts.”

Minna Leinonen: Vimma

Minna Leinonen is a Finnish composer born in 1977. Of her contribution, Vimma (Frenzy), to the Helsinki Variations cycle commissioned by the HPO she writes: “I set out to find inspiration from different sources, trying to get to know new role models. Finally, the life and music of folk musician Kreeta Haapasalo hit me. I never cease to be amazed by the frenzy, tenacity and fire that drove the tireless mother of 11 children to tour the Grand Duchy of Finland and neighbouring countries as a performing artist.”

A song by Haapasalo lamenting the difficult fate of the artist in the early 1850s especially touched Leinonen at a time when the recent pandemic lockdowns were making it difficult for artists to earn a living. The composition exists in several versions; it had never occurred to Haapasalo that a composition should have a final form and owner. The song appears throughout the work as subjects chopped into small pieces. “I also wanted to bring out the melody (or a variant of it) as such in the middle of the piece, slightly coloured, as an arrangement that meets continuity,” Leinonen says.

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: Saudade

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973), winner of many prestigious awards, is Lithuanian and nowadays lives in New York. Fascinated by the meanings concealed within sounds, she says: “I want to ask an existentially important question and to find the answer to it with every new composition. A composition is a very particular state of mind, which transforms the composer as well as the listeners.” The idea for the piece on tonight’s programme came from the Portuguese word ‘saudade’ meaning ‘nostalgia for nostalgia’, or in Martinaitytė’s words: “a meta-nostalgia, a longing oriented toward the longing itself. As poetess Florbela Espanca put it, ‘I long for the longings I don't have.’ In my personal experience this notion of Saudade symbolises the stratum of multiple yearnings that have started layering with the ‘blue period’ – the death of my father and emigration to the USA. For the last decade this thread of longing has been woven into my life, colouring all experiences with a myriad hues of blue.”