Music Finland Core

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The Piccolo Sonata associates in my mind with Schroeder from the Peanuts comic strip, playing a toy grand piano crouching on the floor and responding to the sound of a tiny flute from above (shades Hellaakoski and Oskar Merikanto?). Until – from the outside? – a large, real grand piano sends out its gravity waves. (Yet the full rainbow of gravity remains absent – I wonder what will happen in the Bass Clarinet Sonata, which as at May 2018 is still unwritten?) (Wow – did I just start the creative process for the BCl Sonata? I did once plan to write such a thing – broad arcs, as one might expect, but tranquil rather than hysterically ornamented, also as one might expect. Othmar Schoeck’s Sonata is just such a piece, and I had to reorient myself after discovering that. Pynchonesque? Slothropian?)Of course, the character of each of these sonatas is informed by the force fields created by classic solos and melodies in orchestral repertoire. The Cor Anglais Sonata will necessarily distance itself from The Swan of Tuonela and the melancholy of Tristan. But the Contrabassoon Sonata is a homage to the extreme situations that the deep sound of the instrument creates, for instance at the opening of Hartmann’s Sixth Symphony – never mind Ravel’s Concerto. I remember from the time of my opera Silkkirumpu [The Damask Drum] just how much a single contrabassoon note could achieve.There is a certain encyclopaedic nature to this idea of a cycle of sonatas. A similar idea in miniature form emerged in the work Metamorphoses, which consists of two-minute solos for all wind instruments. Even the saxophone is included twice, as soprano and baritone. And brass, of course –after all, the sonata cycle made its first public appearance with the premiere of four sonatas for piano and brass instrument in Lieksa a decade ago.– Paavo Heininen

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Sonata for piccolo and piano