Young Finnish composer Kimmo Hakola, a student of Rautavaara and Magnus Lindberg, offers some fast and furious chamber music on this disc. His compositional technique seems to be the well-honed unrelenting onslaught, and though this lends his music an athletic quality, ultimately there is too little contrast to sustain long-term interest. Instead, the music leaves the impression sometimes of virtuoso white noise. The first movement of the Clarinet Quintet (“Process”) has promise, but after thirteen minutes nothing has palpably developed; what started as interesting harmonies and incisive sonorities has given way to bland sameness–a fact equally true of the second movement (“Meditation”) which offers more in the way of cadence points, but at just under half an hour it vastly overstays its welcome. The Avanti! Quartet plays extremely well, especially in the final movement when scraping string effects are called for.
Hakola’s solo flight for clarinet, Loco, is dazzling in its difficulty (and displays the amazing talents of Kari Kriikku, and who digs into each piece with passion and precision) and its pan-stylistic genre leaping (from atonal to “jazz” to klezmer) is amusing. But once again the piece is too longwinded for what it actually has to say. Capriole, for bass clarinet and cello, impresses as the most successful work on the disc, with a puckish and childlike quality that shows this composer at his most uninhibited. Its difficulty is obvious, and its lack of contrast is not such a problem here–it does to the ear what an M.C. Escher painting does to the eye, so deceptive and clever is the scoring. Try to follow each instrument as it whizzes up and down scales, it might get you dizzy, but pleasurably so. Excellent recorded sound rounds out a disc of music that reveals a promise not yet fulfilled.
