Being the risky, aspiringly cutting edge things that they are, contemporary music festivals always tend to be a bit hit and miss. Very little i heard at Musica Nova 2025 fell into the latter category, but there were a few pieces that slipped through the quality net, being memorable for all the wrong reasons. Most were pretty harmless, such as Meriheini Luoto‘s bland Sopu, a new work for the Guards Band premièred in Helsinki’s remarkable Temppeliaukio Church (carved out of solid rock), though the piece that ended their concert was anything but harmless. It’s hard to think of a time when i’ve been more appalled at what was going into my ears than during Matthew Hindson and Paul Mac‘s Requiem for a City. The most empty form of mindlessly upbeat minimalism, its faux-pretty surface not even trying to mask the vacuous underscore beneath, ticking all the boxes required of music destined for the creative wastelands of some grey corporate venture or an nth-rate movie.) The fact that it evidently took two people to create such worthless, repellant dreck tells you everything you need to know about the abilities of Mac and Hindson. Pure yahooism – music by, and for, idiots.
Thankfully, the concert had a lot more to offer. Augusta Read Thomas‘s bassoon concerto Carnival explored a curious kind of non-relationship, with soloist Kari Tikkala coming across as lyrical and thoughtful to the band’s blank, gestural blurts. What was interesting about this was the questions it raised: Who was actually the more compelling? Was the bassoon just preventing everyone from letting rip and having a good time? Gradually it developed into more of a dialogue, but who was winning whom over remained hard to tell, and Tikkala’s high, final solo note could be read as either a sign of triumph or frustrated stalemate.
The highlight of the concert was soft brown wax by William Dougherty, expanding the Guards Band with fixed media electronics. The piece bristled with energy, demonstrating a palpable sense of sonic evolution, both within the band and electronics respectively as well as between the two. A network of pitchless instrumental snufflings slowly gained pitch content, while a drone got louder and louder all around. Squelchy interruptions from the electronics seemed catalytic, changing the brass in particular into a network of faint, squealing entities – a positively gleeful passage – and even when amassing into the most enormous throbbing pulse, here too the effect on the band seemed positive, transforming everyone into a sustained chorus, an instrumental firmament to the electronics’ foundation. Often stunningly beautiful, while there were occasional hints of conflict between the players (most notably the brass) and electronics, this seemed secondary to the fecund results of their interactions. Spectacular music for a spectacular venue.
Another fabulous performance space was Helsinki’s House of Nobility, the main hall of which is festooned with over 300 elaborate coats of arms. The music didn’t always live up to the location, the most egregious being Cecilia Damström‘s breathtakingly rubbish violin concerto Earth Songs. Performed by soloist Linda Suolahti with TampereRaw (plus an occasional, rather passive tape part), it was like being subjected to a particularly over-zealous student composition. Its seven increasingly agonising movements encompassed all the worst excesses one might hope against hope to avoid: trivial, simplistic blather masquerading as depth; empty, neo-romantic noodling; primitive passages of basic drones, scales, arpeggios and trills; later growing into the most bargain basement histrionics in lieu of something – anything – that might be called authentic. Every single note was a cliché, borrowed or stolen from somewhere far more worthy than this meaningless piece of garbage. The fact that Damström wanted to palm this off as some kind of eco-love song only made it more revolting.
The most delightful contrast to this came in Squeaky Clean, a piece for “4 tubers, violin and cello” by Thai composer Piyawat Louilarpprasert, whose music was a special highlight of this year’s Musica Nova. Unforgettably performed by members of Uusinta Ensemble, the quartet of tubers each wielded small mouthpieces (designed and 3D-printed by Louilarpprasert), fed into long rubber tubes leading to a funnel-like speaker. They, with the string instruments acting in sympathy, formed the most amazingly sonically intricate – and unexpected – chorus of joyous complexity and cacophony: drones, clusters, piercing wails, slews of convoluted filigree, insanely free-flowing melodies, all fluidly passing back-and-forth along a continuum between extremes of clean and dirty. In lesser hands, a composition like this would descend into mere novelty, but Louilarpprasert ensured its musical qualities matched its undeniable quirkiness. The House of Nobility can surely never have heard anything like it within its hallowed walls.
Uusinta Ensemble also performed Croatian composer Sara Glojnarić‘s sugarcoating #3. Driven along by a drum kit, its gestural texture nonetheless suggested more than just that. Sure enough, over time there was a distinct impression that the ensemble were all working through something – both individually and as a collective – a process that was intricate and mischeivous, passing through hyper, overloaded tuttis and more sparse, meticulous episodes. Exciting and hugely engrossing, this was undoubtedly the high point of the concert.
Not everything i heard in Helsinki was new to me. It was good to experience Elis Hallik‘s To Become a Tree again, performed by Zagros Ensemble, not only because it’s one of her best compositions, but because, despite my familiarity with this piece, they made it sound brand new. Previously, it’s made me reflect on the aspect of effort permeating the piece, the way the players seem to be strenuously working toward something (i’ve previously wondered whether this was its main point). But now, the emphasis – the point of the effort – was entirely on the emergence of a new form of song. The work’s wonderfully exotic soundworld was vividly realised, elusive yet close, and viscerally unsettling, the instruments volatile and distorted. This was the birthplace for Hallik’s new song, lyrical, passionate, fiery, but also with an element of brute force projected by Zagros, as if trying to force the song out and imbue it with coherence. It was breathtaking.
In the same concert was the world première of Penelope by Jukka-Pekka Lehto. While it was kept at something of a distance due to the lack of a provided translation for its Latin text, the piece nonetheless leapt across the language barrier and spoke with real immediacy. Its lyricality seemed fraught, even frightened, regularly broken by less focused stuff. The effect was to create a music not so much weighty as weighed down, and while the text seemed to energise the ensemble to a strong, spirited tutti, it fell back into a deeply disquieted quietness, its pitch content dissolving at the end. It was followed by Vom Verschwinden einer Landschaft II by Polish composer Joanna Wozny. This was tentative, speculative music, all about questions in the material, what a sound or an idea might be, mean, or connect with. It was all the more tantalising for staying in this mode throughout, Wozny bravely keeping its questions unresolved at the end.
Another work that wasn’t new to me was Enno Poppe‘s Prozession, performed by the usual (and best) suspects – Ensemble Musikfabrik conducted by Poppe – at Musica Nova’s closing concert. By this stage, having raved about it following its UK première in Huddersfield, and subsequent CD release, there’s perhaps little more to be said, at least by me. Yet i was struck by two things especially during this performance. First, there was less sense of regression at the points where the music restarts; now it felt more like a consistent, growing continuity, one that waxed and waned as it moved inexorably onward.
Second, was the impression made by the final section of the piece. i previously described this as “a pained kind of peace”, but this time the work’s progression from melodies to chords took on a clarity and a strength as they continued, even projecting radiance, before growing weak, unclear, and sagging. Considering the enormous highs of the piece, it was an interestingly low-key, even downbeat, conclusion, indicating the extent to which Prozession taps into – and strains to escape from – tiredness and struggle, all the while striving to persist and keep going.
The TampereRaw and Ensemble Musikfabrik concerts can be streamed from Finnish radio,
[…] has already become more, become essentially a classic of our time. Enno Poppe’s Prozession, heard on the closing night, is an example of that, and another is Still, Rebecca Saunders‘ 2011 violin concerto, […]