Juhani Nuorvala (born in Finland in 1961) is of a generation of young composers still in search of a voice. They know all the tricks of postmodernism as well as the different turns of popular music, including American jazz. Elements of jazz improvisation permeate Three Impromptus for clarinet and kantele, but without jazz’s rhythmic cadences to hold it together. (The kantele is a Finnish harp-like instrument.) Only in the second movement is there any kind of melody, but it’s soon dropped for long, somnambulistic exchanges between the clarinet and the kantele. The work’s atonal character is rather unpleasant and might be due to the odd pairing of the two instruments. Their individual sound characteristics just don’t mesh well. The two String Quartets are the major works here and provide only occasional moments of interest. In the String Quartet No. 2, the composer makes several nods to rock and jazz, but the result sounds strangely like something the Kronos Quartet would knock off at a pops concert–and it’s played about as erratically. The title work here, “What’s a Nice Chord Like You Doing in a Piece Like This”, is for three accordions (all three roles are performed by Mikko Luoma). It’s more of a curiosity than anything else and its brevity is its greatest virtue. Frankly, these works appear to be on the level of Master’s degree compositions. As such, only the mildly curious or academically inquisitive are likely to have any interest in this disc.
