If you’re only interested in a single disc of Joonas Kokkonen’s music, then let this be the one. It contains three out-and-out masterpieces, stunningly played and recorded with even more vividness and immediacy than on the already superb BIS complete orchestral music edition. Kokkonen’s austere but deeply felt idiom, with its atmospheric tone colors and fleeting lyricism, follows logically on the Sibelius of the Fourth Symphony. This is particularly true of Kokkonen’s Third and Fourth Symphonies, which have much the same feeling of organic growth from just a few simple motives that so often characterizes Sibelius’ work. Sakari Oramo and the Finnish Radio Symphony probe the music’s every crack and crevice, and in particular manage to give Kokkonen’s special brand of stillness (in the outer movements of the Fourth and the closing Adagio of the Third) great potency and a real feeling of latent power.
The Cello Concerto surely belongs among the greatest works in the genre, and it deserves to be an international repertory item. Its thematic invention is top-notch, the solo writing grateful, virtuosic, and deeply affecting. I can’t imagine an audience not responding to this beautiful piece, and Marko Ylönen plays it about as well as it can be done. His handling of the fourth movement, a large solo cadenza similar to what we find in Shostakovich’s First cello concerto, is unfailingly imaginative, but then his rich tone and incisive rhythmic pointing in the quick sections is every bit as impressive. It’s a shame that Kokkonen’s output is so small, but maybe that only makes it easier for the curious to sample. The bottom line: this terrific disc belongs in every serious collection.
