One of the most fascinating events at this year’s Musica Nova festival was LOKS – four concerts at once. Not so much a performance as a film juxtaposing and compositing four separate performances, it featured music by four composers whose initials form the title: Lauri Supponen, Oene val Geel, Krists Auznieks and Sophia Günst. Each composer devised a piece for quartet; these were performed four times, in four countries, with four different ensembles, all of which formed the basis for the 60-minute film, directed by Toms Harjo. Rather boldly, the composers decided that the performances should not be synchronised, resulting in more fluid kind of movement between them, focused yet spontaneous. LOKS is therefore effectively a multitrack piece, melding different quantities of each performance to create complex amalgams and agglomerations. It had prominent mash-up and even prog-rock qualities at times, which only added to its intricacy and level of immersion.
Does it need to be treated as an audiovisual work? Perhaps it’s a moot point, at least for me, as the few attempts i made to listen with closed eyes didn’t last long as the visual sight of the blended performances – always presented very simply but elegantly, a mix of cuts, split screens and overlays, elaborated with a wonderful timeline at the bottom that simultaneously indicated the quantities of L, O, K and S – was far too compelling.
The sonic narrative, despite seemingly being chaos waiting to happen, turned out to be coherent and rewarding. It had a meditative state that acted as something like a foundation, a baseline or origin from which everything else sprang. This also permeated the unpredictable flow in such a way that we weren’t so much in a permanent state of ‘expecting the unexpected’ as inhabiting a space where notions of ‘relevance’ were rendered moot. It passed through lulls rather than longueurs, was rhapsodic rather than developmental. Energy erupted on a whim, not in any way displacing something contemplative but existing adjacent to it, or becoming impossibly altered by it (and vice versa). Likewise melody, of a myriad forms and formulations, materialised from nothing, hovered over the shifting textures in a way that was always bafflingly pertinent. At no point did it sound even remotely like two or more disjunct elements were being allowed to sound for no good purpose, apropos of nothing, which speaks volumes to the skill of the composers and Harjo in putting together such an utterly convincing and cohesive patchwork symphony.
One aspect of Musica Nova that deserves brief but special mention are the talks that took place throughout the festival. These usually took the familiar form of pre- and mid-concert talks hosted by artistic director Tuuli Lindeberg. However, beyond this they included lengthier one-to-one discussions (including an especially illuminating conversation with Enno Poppe) and encompassed a ‘Music of Our Time’ lecture series taking place at the Sibelius Academy. i was able to attend the lecture given by Lara Poe, and was struck by the open-mindedness of a festival keen to encourage such rigorous, in-depth opportunities for composers to discuss their work. Varied talks such as these should be absolutely standard at every new music festival, as the extent to which they foster deeper audience engagement and understanding is enormous.
Back in 2023 i was wowed by Happy Music For Orchestra, the latest album from British musician Alex Paxton (and one of my best albums of that year), so i was excited at the prospect of hearing his ensemble piece Scrunchy Touch Sweetly to Fall in Helsinki. Performed by the joint forces of NYKY Ensemble (the Sibelius Academy’s contemporary music group) and Ensemble Recherche, conducted by David Claudio, it was everything i hoped it to be. Imagine the ‘Epode’ from Chronochromie but with actual tunes. An abstract opening soon made concrete in a mess of melodies and calls, coming from literally everywhere. These tunes were given a short but lovely episode of special focus before returning to its default position, a wild melee of mad, fluorescent joy.
In the same concert was Fanofania by Salvatore Sciarrino, which was practically the complete sonic opposite. Its mostly behaviourally static soundworld was populated by infinitesimals: tiny sighs, shivers, motes of melody, far-off thuds. There was a neutrality to all this that, unexpectedly, lent the sounds potential, made them malleable, coming alive in our imaginations and becoming whatever (if anything) we wanted them to be. It was disarmingly engrossing.
Contemporary music festivals inevitably place a lot of emphasis on the new, compositions in the process of being born. That’s special enough, but it’s even more special when you realise something new 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, performed by Carolin Widmann (who else?) with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nicoló Umberto Foron. i’ve previously explored Still‘s world première and UK première; this was its Finnish première.
On this occasion the frenetic first movement was clearly presented as being instigated by the violin, Widmann’s trills, crescendi, accents acting as archetypes that became amplified, expanded, elaborated by the orchestra into a thrilling, behaviourally unified soundworld. The music was given a spontaneous electricity, paradoxically seeming amazingly unpredictable despite demonstrating smooth evolution and development. Hints of the work’s original title – rage – could be felt in its teetering between song and violence, usually mingling both simultaneously. Whenever Widmann stopped, it was as if she’d set off the orchestra in a particular behavioural direction, where they continued until she redirected them. Foron made the contrasting second movement dark and strange, the violin now the orchestra’s equal. They moved together in a weird but beautiful way that now seemed neither violent nor singing, something askew but mesmerising.
The concert had opened with ISHJÄRTA by Lisa Streich, a fascinating work that posed way more questions than it aimed to answer (always a good thing). Faint arpeggiated triads half-spoke in a gentle, microtonal space, feeling somewhat weighted down such that their movement and pitch certainty sounded difficult. Abrupt surges and flurries suggested extant musical ideas (some vaguely filmic), but everything nonetheless still seemed to add up to something provisional: a desire to speak rather than substantive utterance. All of which made its sudden propulsion forward like some kind of death march more enigmatic. This was a music continually reforming, seemingly in the hope of finding the best possible way to really articulate, mysterious and beguiling.
Thai composer Piyawat Louilarpprasert had already made a deep impression earlier at Musica Nova with his short but unforgettable chamber work Squeaky Clean, and he was represented on this occasion by Ptera, for orchestra “and sound objects”. The latter comprised many, many more of Louilarpprasert’s custom-designed ‘squeakers’, played both directly and inserted into the mouthpieces of various instruments. This was the basis for the work’s fascinating soundworld in which the familiar was made bizarre, opening in a chorus of rude but focused brass blaring. Embellished with ratchets, rumbled with drums, featuring bursting blurts and siren-like wails and squeaks (evoking Varèse), and churning sequences of grinding pulse, Ptera unfolded like the output of a huge, animalistic machine.
i wrote in the first instalment about the crucial distinction between music that’s entertaining and music that’s entertainment. Ptera was emphatically the former, as deeply-considered and tightly-constructed as it was wonderfully uproarious. Louilarpprasert doesn’t merely flit from strangeness to strangeness but allows his fabulously odd sounds and ideas real time to speak, in the process showing them to have detail, intricacy and agency within the work’s by turns taut, bestial, playful and hilarious environment. The tendency, as a listener, when confronted by music like this is to gravitate toward and simply relish its oddity. But that’s to do a complete disservice to the creative depth and imagination of Louilarpprasert’s music; for all is apparent mayhem and abandon, this was serious stuff, exhilarating, hugely compelling and for me, the absolute highlight of Musica Nova 2025.
LOKS – four concerts at once is available to stream on YouTube. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra concert is available to stream via the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE.
