Composer
Biography:
Kalevi aho was born on March 9, 1949 in Forsa, southern Finland. He learned to play the mandolin and violin at the age of nine and has been composing since that time. Growing up he loved the great romantic symphonists, and while still at school he wrote several string quartets and sonatas for solo violin, as well as his first orchestral piece - all without any instruction, straight from listening. After graduating from high school, he began studying mathematics and at the same time studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Einojuhani Rautavaara, the versatile, colorful and technically adept pluralist of styles, who can now be considered Finland's most popular symphonist after Sibelius. Rautavaara's undogmatic approach was ideal for Aho, who would far surpass his teacher in stylistic pluralism. As early as 1969, in the first year of his studies, he wrote his first symphony, a highly astonishing, excellently crafted work of great design, permeated with youthful genius, which immediately enabled him to break through in his Finnish homeland.
Perfect mastery of technique, especially of the large orchestra, and free flight of imagination are the hallmarks of his work, which reveals itself in extremely different facets from work to work. To date, Aho has composed sixteen symphonies, which can be seen as a kind of creative core of his oeuvre. He is no less important as an opera composer, but so far none of his operas have appeared on CD, which has an inhibiting effect on distribution. His opera production is of eminent interest, as he is by nature a musical dramatist with powerful visuals, highly talented in suggestive psychological guidance and illumination of the acting characters and events as well as in depicting the tragic and bizarre. Aho also has a lucky hand for timelessly topical and at the same time complexly demanding subjects, just think of works like The Life of Insects or When We All Drowned.
Above all, in addition to three advanced chamber symphonies, his virtuoso chamber music cannot be overlooked, at the center of which is the series of quintets for wind instruments and strings in very differently mixed instrumentations (e.g. the tonally and structurally highly original quintet for alto saxophone, bassoon, viola, Cello and double bass from 1994, which, as is so often the case with him, is »about elementary opposites that determine our lives: harmony and destructiveness, joy and despair, balance and imbalance, life and lifelessness«.) As a symphonist, Aho burst through all the boundaries that the genre is happily imposed on (especially in the 1975th and 80th symphonies composed between 5 and 6), and with his Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Symphonies he created works that rank among the most substantial that have been created in this field in our time became. »I have always composed catastrophes. But I have no catastrophic ideologies. There is just so much tension, something violent has to happen and the structure can break. This is then a form that 'breaks' in its tension.«
Albums:
