Works by Vaughan Williams, Ellen Reid, Caroline Shaw, and Nico Muhly
Pekka Kuusisto, violin; Sam Amidon, vocals, banjo, guitar; Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
Platoon
Pekka Kuusisto’s Willows is one of those carefully imagined albums in which programming, performance style, and emotional atmosphere all feel inseparable. Built around themes of grief, remembrance, and fragile continuity, it places Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending alongside contemporary works by Ellen Reid, Caroline Shaw, and Nico Muhly, creating a sequence that feels less like a recital than a reflective arc.
The most immediately striking feature is Kuusisto’s approach to The Lark Ascending. Rather than presenting the work in the familiar, glowing pastoral manner, he draws attention to its strangeness, intimacy, and instability. His tone often seems to hover on the edge of speech or breath, with lines that drift freely and then gather shape again in unexpectedly supple phrases. The effect is less overtly rhapsodic than in many performances and more elusive, even questioning. What emerges is not a generalized pastoral dream but a more unsettled, searching meditation, one that feels close to the work’s historical moment and to its inwardness. The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra proves an ideal partner, alert to detail and texture, with wind and brass lines etched clearly into the fabric rather than blended into a wash.
That sense of refinement and emotional exposure carries into Ellen Reid’s Desiderium, a work that makes a powerful contrast with Vaughan Williams while preserving the album’s atmosphere of loss and longing. Reid’s writing alternates jagged, nervous energy with passages of lyrical suspension, and Kuusisto meets both sides of the piece with complete conviction. The more aggressive writing has bite and danger, but what lingers most is the way the music repeatedly searches for warmth and continuity without ever fully settling into them.
Caroline Shaw’s Plan & Elevation, heard here in a chamber-orchestra arrangement, provides a different kind of stillness. Its textures are spare, lucid, and quietly architectural, offering a sequence of meditative spaces between the album’s more emotionally charged statements. The performance emphasizes clarity of line and a finely judged play of light and shadow, allowing Shaw’s restrained language to function as a hinge between the older and newer works on the program.
The final group, Nico Muhly’s arrangements of songs by Sam Amidon, broadens the album’s expressive range without breaking its mood. Amidon’s unaffected singing, along with his banjo and guitar, introduces an American folk strain that feels entirely at home here. Muhly’s arrangements are subtle but alive with detail, and Kuusisto with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra respond not as accompanists but as active partners in the songs’ unfolding. The blend of folk modality, chamber precision, and understated dramatic tension gives these performances an unusual freshness.
What makes Willows so compelling is not simply that it juxtaposes old and new music, or classical and folk-derived idioms. Many albums do that. What distinguishes this one is the strength of its internal logic and the seriousness of its emotional purpose. Kuusisto does not treat these pieces as display vehicles or stylistic experiments. He shapes them as parts of a single meditation on memory, absence, and the persistence of song.
The result is a beautifully judged album: imaginative in conception, deeply felt in execution, and consistently absorbing in sound and atmosphere. Even listeners who think they know The Lark Ascending well may find themselves hearing it differently here—not as a familiar emblem, but as something more fragile, private, and newly alive.
