ULJAS PULKKIS (b.1975): Enchanted Garden for Violin and Orchestra, Flute Concerto, Symphonic Dalí.

Description: Pulkkis is a young composer who has already synthesized a highly individual voice, consisting of a melding of a wide range of contemporary techniques. The fact that these techniques are used in startlingly different proportions in different works accounts for the fact that these pieces have very different stylistic emphases. The sprightly and scintillating flute concerto is rather neoclassical, with clear and precise orchestration and well-defined dialogue between soloist (who provides a few microtonal inflections in the meditative middle movement) and orchestra. By contrast, Enchanted Garden, from a few years earlier, is a kind of post-spectralist take on impressionism. The freely treated tonal basis is there, and like all these pieces the work has a tonal feel, but here the orchestra envelops the soloist in a shimmering haze of microtones and coloristic effects, used to heighten the sensuousness of the lush romantic orchestration, not to conflict with it. Symphonic Dalí is something else again; evocations of three well-known Dalí paintings in a lush Romantic style that overtly pays homage to Respighi and Ravel, and at times seems not so very far removed from an epic film score. Jaakko Kuusisto (violin), Sharon Bezaly (flute), Stavanger Symphony Orchestra; Susanna Mälkki.