Piano Concerto / KRAFT

" - - the precence of an impressive talent is vividly on display here, and you won't find more persuasive interpretations."
Artistic Quality 10/10 Sound Quality
- ClassicsToday.com

"Lindberg here plays his own Piano Concerto, a substantial half-hour work that is both beguiling and dazzling where Kraft is mean and moody. If rhythm drives that earlier work, here the overriding mantra is harmony, in all sorts of weird and wonderful guises, from spectral to new-romantic. Again, there is no disputing the authority of the performance, expertly balanced by the Ondine engineers."
The Daily Telegraph

A long expected recording of Magnus Lindberg's KRAFT and Piano Concerto with composer himself as the soloist is now available. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The Toimii ensemble appears as the soloist ensemble of KRAFT. Lindberg himself worked in the studio together with engineers and producers to refine carefully the balance and the sound of KRAFT - one could truly say that this is 'the authorised recording'.

KRAFT (1985) is considered the 'icon of the 1980's' and it was also a beginning of Lindberg's stunning career. Its 82 cm tall score reveals a highly complex and detailed structure: "An alliance of the hyper-complex and the primitive," as the composer himself summarized it. KRAFT is much like a large vessel where musicians - quite literally - transport the sound from one edge of the space to the other.

The constantly shifting piano texture plays a number of roles in the Piano Concerto (1990-1994). The Composer himself is obviously the best interpreter of this energetic work. The orchestration of the Piano Concerto is reminiscent of Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, and there's even a fleeting but obvious reference to the keyboard texture of Claude Debussy. Magnus Lindberg summarizes: "The language of music must above all be rich."