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AguidetoMagnusLindberg'smusic|Music|TheGuardian
It's a long way from here to here. The first is from Magnus Lindberg's 1985 piece Kraft
(Power), a work that one commentator called Lindberg's Rite of Spring, scored for huge
orchestra, a group of perambulatory soloists, an assemblage of junkyard percussion, and
live electronics; music that's one of the great sonic brouhahas of the late 20th century.
Kraft is the aural result of what happens when German metal-merchants Einstrzende
Neubauten meets Xenakis (two of Lindberg's most important inspirations at the time)
filtered through an iconoclastic twentysomething Finnish composer's imagination. The
second is from Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, a piece composed 17 years later, and which
sounds well, completely, utterly, totally different. The concerto sounds more like what
happens when Gershwin meets Sibelius and Stravinsky, perhaps on some convenient
Icelandic ice-floe in the mid-Atlantic, in a voluptuously melodic crossing of cultures. The
question is how Lindberg got from one to the other and how and why this music has
come to be one of the definitive sounds of the 21st century orchestra, as ensembles from
the New York Philharmonic to the Finnish Radio Symphony and the BBC Symphony
champion Lindberg, making him one of the most-performed composers of new
orchestral music.
One of the reasons is simple to understand: Lindberg, who was born in 1958 in Finland
and trained at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, is now a not-especially-gris eminence of
that astonishing generation of Finnish musicians who have the musical world as their
collective plaything: composers Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kaija Saariaho, clarinettist Kari
Kriikku, cellist Anssi Karttunen, conductors Sakari Oramo and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and
many others besides. A prodigiously gifted teenager who was writing gigantic orchestral
scores before he turned 20, Lindberg was also the founder of the Toimii Ensemble, along
with Salonen, Kriikku, and Karttunen, and he was and remains a virtuoso pianist to boot.
Kraft's power comes from the way it juxtaposes smashes together is a better of putting
it the soloists of Toimii (who perform the piece in all-white sportsgear when I've seen
them play it) with the orchestra. The energy released by these explosions of personnel
and of musical material define the piece's chaotic but unstoppable momentum, and it's
one of the jaw-dropping feats of contemporary orchestral gigantism if you're lucky
enough to hear it live.
But that's only part of what makes Kraft work. Its dynamism really comes from the way
all this surface sound and fury is underpinned by Lindberg's harmonic thinking. In Kraft,
that dimension of the music is based in this piece on the principle of the chaconne,
repetitions of small-scale harmonic cycles. And for all its in-your-face energy, Kraft's
language was developed, in part, by Lindberg's use of computer software to create
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/apr/16/contemporarymusicguidemagnuslindberg
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Clarinet Concerto
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