Aho: Oboe Concerto and Orchestral Works

Kalevi Aho has spent decades composing himself into a corner that most composers would envy — a place where the bleakness of the Finnish landscape and the demands of absolute formal rigor somehow produce music of genuine expressive urgency. He is not Sibelius’s heir, exactly, though the comparison is inevitable and not entirely wrong. More accurately, he is what happens when a composer absorbs the mid-century Scandinavian avant-garde and then stubbornly refuses to let it have the final word.

The Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra is a substantial, seriously argued piece. Thirty-one minutes. Three movements, each carrying its own weight.

Aho has written fifteen symphonies and concertos for instruments ranging from tuba to bassoon — he seems almost constitutionally incapable of ignoring an instrument — and his concertos share a family resemblance: they are dialogues rather than showcases, conversations between a soloist and an orchestra that is never merely decorative. The oboe concerto fits this pattern. The opening movement establishes a world of modal ambiguity and long-breathed melodic lines that coil and unfold with the slow deliberateness of something living in cold water. Aho knows exactly what the oboe can sustain, both technically and expressively, and he never wastes a phrase.

Piet Van Bockstal plays all of this with a tone that is — there is no other word — radiant. Warm without being plummy, precise without any trace of the clinical. His phrasing in the slow movement has a quality of inward searching that the music demands and that many oboists simply cannot supply, tending as they do toward the brilliant rather than the contemplative. Van Bockstal’s dynamic control is exceptional; pianissimos that could easily blur or pinch instead remain focused and singing. In the concerto’s finale, where Aho lets the rhythmic energy finally uncoil into something approaching exhilaration, Van Bockstal rides the current without losing his center.

Martyn Brabbins and the Lahti Symphony are ideal partners. Brabbins has always had the ability to hold complex textures transparently — you hear everything, and nothing feels forced. The Lahti orchestra brings its own history to this music; they have been recording Finnish repertoire for decades and understand that this is not a music you push. It moves at its own pace, or it doesn’t move at all.

The Solo IX for solo oboe, recorded separately at Potton Hall in Suffolk, is something else entirely. Ten minutes of unaccompanied writing that draws on Aho’s long engagement with the idea of a single voice speaking into silence. The acoustics at Potton Hall suit it — drier than Sibelius Hall, more immediate, which is exactly right for music this exposed. Van Bockstal navigates the multiphonics and extreme registers without turning the piece into a technical exhibition. He makes it sound inevitable.

Then there is the Sonata for Oboe and Piano from 1984 to 1985 — an earlier piece, and it shows, though not in any damaging way. The idiom is somewhat more openly post-Romantic, the emotional temperature a degree or two warmer, and Yutaka Oya plays with a sensitivity to texture and weight that keeps the piano from dominating. The sonata’s slow movement is the finest thing in the piece, a long elegy that neither indulges nor withholds.

Is this the definitive disc of Aho’s oboe music? Almost certainly, because there is not much competition. But that framing is too narrow. Van Bockstal and his colleagues have made a release that stands on its own merits — one that makes you want to hear Aho’s music again, and soon.