Pekka Kuusisto, from Finland, is not your typical classical violinist. He's been known to swallow tiny microphones in concert, and he might just break into a homegrown folk tune, strumming his fiddle like a mandolin.
Kuusisto has capably recorded the standard repertoire — including Mozart and Vivaldi — but on his new album, Willows, where he plays his violin and leads the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, he's making some typically unexpected choices.
At the heart of the album is a performance of The Lark Ascending that's guaranteed to ruffle feathers. The soothing, pastoral work for violin and orchestra, by British composer by Ralph Vaughan Williams, was written as World War I loomed. Over the past century, the piece has reached a beloved status, especially in the U.K., where in recent years it has topped the Classic FM Hall of Fame listener's poll 12 times.
If you know and love The Lark, Kuusisto's version will forever change how you hear the music. "We're not deleting notes," Kuusisto says in the album's booklet, "we're deleting ketchup." He's referring to the performance history of the piece, often sweetened with a high fructose sensibility. Instead of the creamy, polished violin tone typically heard in recordings and live performances, Kuusisto offers a reedy, ramshackle sound; his violin almost imitates a bamboo flute. You can hear an abundance of bow hair lightly applied to the strings. The effect is like a whisper, sometimes so fragile that he struggles to maintain a viable tone. Kuusisto's Lark sounds vulnerable, like Europe must have felt in 1914. But it can also trill and soar high into the sky, an out-of-focus dot almost past human sight.
Kuusisto leans into The Lark's folksy vibe, so it's perhaps a telling choice that he includes some actual folk music on the album. The Vermont singer and guitarist Sam Amidon joins for not just one, but six old folk tunes, dressed in new, evocative string arrangements. His unadorned vocals, without a trace of vibrato, lend the songs a documentarian's authenticity, pulling you into their stories. "Way Go, Lily," with its mesmerizing pulse, is an old African American call-and-response children's song that on the surface is playful, but also suggests resistance to authority. "How Come That Blood," a murder ballad, finds a young man struggling to explain his crimson stains.
It took Kuusisto three years to make Willows, and in that span he lost both parents and his brother Jaakko — also a violinist and conductor. You can hear the profound loss in Desiderium, a solo violin piece written for Kuusisto by Pulitzer winner Ellen Reid, who dedicated it to Jaakko. Near the beginning, there's a passage that opens with a mellifluous tune, almost like an outtake from The Lark, but then spirals into a kind of ominous whooping cough.
The addition of music by Caroline Shaw, another Pulitzer winner, nicely fits the rustic aesthetic blowing through Willows. Plan & Elevation, music originally for string quartet but arranged here by the composer for string orchestra, is inspired by gardens and architecture, but also by Ravel and Mozart. Shaw braids quotes from Ravel's String Quartet in F and Mozart's Quartet in G in a section titled "The Cutting Garden." In "The Orangery," minimalist arpeggios oscillate, eventually sliding into "The Beech Tree," where pizzicato intensifies, like raindrops falling on leaves.
Pekka Kuusisto could have made a conventional album, bloated with a glitzy, warhorse concerto. Instead, he pulls us deep into the music through the sound of his violin, his mercurial choices and one agile imagination.
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