Composer
Biography:
Kalevi Aho was born on 9 March 1949 in Forsa, southern Finland. He learned to play the mandolin and violin at the age of nine, and has been composing ever since. As a teenager, he loved the great Romantic symphonists, and during his school years he wrote several string quartets and sonatas for solo violin, as well as his first orchestral piece – all without any instruction, simply by ear. 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, colourful and technically skilled stylistic pluralist who is now considered Finland's most popular symphonist after Sibelius. Rautavaara's undogmatic approach was ideal for Aho, who was to far surpass his teacher in terms of stylistic pluralism. As early as 1969, in his first year of study, he wrote his First Symphony, a highly astonishing, exquisitely crafted work of great scope, imbued with youthful genius, which immediately enabled him to make his breakthrough in his native Finland.
Perfect mastery of technique, especially of the large orchestra, and free flight of fancy are hallmarks of his work, which reveals extremely different facets from piece to piece. To date, Aho has composed sixteen symphonies, which can be regarded as the creative core of his oeuvre. He is no less significant as an opera composer, but none of his operas have yet been released on CD, which has had a dampening effect on their dissemination. Yet it is precisely his opera production that is of eminent interest, as he is by nature above all a visually powerful music dramatist, highly gifted in the suggestive psychological guidance and illumination of the characters and events, as well as in the depiction of the tragic and bizarre. Aho also has a knack for timelessly topical and at the same time complex and demanding subjects, as evidenced by works such as Das Leben der Insekten (The Life of Insects) and Wenn wir alle ertrunken sind (When We Are All Drowned).
In addition to three advanced chamber symphonies, his virtuoso chamber music cannot be overlooked, centred on a series of quintets for wind and string instruments in a wide variety of combinations (for example, the highly original quintet for alto saxophone, bassoon, viola, cello and double bass from 1994, which, as so often with him, deals with “the fundamental contrasts that determine our lives: harmony and destructiveness, joy and despair, balance and imbalance, life and lifelessness”). As a symphonist, Aho has broken down all the boundaries imposed on the genre (especially in his Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6, composed between 1975 and 1980), and with his Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Symphonies, he has created works that are among the most substantial ever written in this field in our time. “I have composed catastrophes time and again. But I have no catastrophic ideologies. There are simply such enormous tensions that something violent must happen, and the structure can break apart as a result. This is then a ‘form breaking apart’ due to its tension.”
Albums:
