Olli Mustonen News
Finnish pianist, conductor and composer
- piano, harpsichord
- classical music
- Finland
- conductor, pianist, composer, politician
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2024-03-10
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2023-12-31 09:22:00
2023 in record reviews: 17th century Venice as a gay haven, Dichterliebe Reimagined, Elgar on viola, Ethel Smyth's first operatic success
[…] Abbate revealed a distinctive voice and richly rewarding sound-world.Jocelyn Freeman and friends created a compelling programme of Pushkin-related music Britten, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, whilst Peter Jablonski and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra explored Grażyna Bacewicz's piano concertos.Contemporary music included the stunning sound world of Russian-trained Estonian composer, Galina Grigorjeva's music for male-voice choir, Arne Nordheim's seductive The Tempest, Suite from the Ballet, and Jonathan Dove's intense In Exile. The Engegård Quartet continued their exploration of Olli Mustonen's chamber music with the terrific, atmospheric pairing of String Quartet No. 1 and Piano Quintet.In a slightly unlikely but completely tempting pairing, countertenor Reginald Mobley joined jazz pianist/composer Baptiste Trotignon for a disc of spirituals.Read our 2023 selection below:Style and elegance: with Bach-Abel Society, Les Ombres take us back to the elegant evenings of the Bach-Abel concerts in LondonGalina Grigorjeva: Music for Male-Voice Choir, a simply stunning disc that brings together the rich and […]
2023-08-14 04:30:00
Rautavaara and Martinů: Piano Concertos (CD Review)
by Ryan RossRautavaara: Piano Concerto No. 3 ‘Gift of Dreams’; Martinů: Piano Concerto No. 3. Olli Mustonen, piano; Lahti Symphony Orchestra; Dalia Stasevska, conductor. BIS-2532The unexpected coupling of these two compositions is already creating some buzz for this recording. What do they and their composers at all have in common anyway? According to the liner notes by Jean-Pascal Vachon, both men “adopted an attitude free from any musical puritanism, constantly finding new sources of inspiration which they explored without taboos.” Right. But these are also both very accessible compositions in a 20th-century musical landscape where accessibility still isn’t a particularly prestigious value, even in hindsight. It was one thing for Martinů to be composing neo-Romantic music (Vachon notes his Third Concerto’s links with Brahms) as late as 1948, but what of Rautavaara cranking out works that are at once so individual and yet so unabashedly easy on the ears, decades after having forsaken […]
2022-11-02 08:00:43
The last of the nine written as recently as three quarters of a century ago, Prokofiev’s piano sonat
2022-09-13 07:00:00
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