Violinist Pekka Kuusisto is just not afraid to ruffle a couple of feathers : NPR

Pekka Kuusisto, from Finland, is just not your typical classical violinist. He is been identified to swallow tiny microphones in live performance, and he may simply break right into a homegrown folks tune, strumming his fiddle like a mandolin.

Kuusisto has capably recorded the usual repertoire — together with Mozart and Vivaldi — however on his new album, Willows, the place he performs his violin and leads the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, he is making some sometimes surprising decisions.

On the coronary heart of the album is a efficiency of The Lark Ascending that is assured to ruffle feathers. The soothing, pastoral work for violin and orchestra, by British composer by Ralph Vaughan Williams, was written as World Struggle I loomed. Over the previous century, the piece has reached a beloved standing, particularly within the U.Ok., the place lately it has topped the Basic FM Corridor of Fame listener’s ballot 12 instances.

If you realize and love The Lark, Kuusisto’s model will without end change the way you hear the music. “We’re not deleting notes,” Kuusisto says within the album’s booklet, “we’re deleting ketchup.” He is referring to the efficiency historical past of the piece, typically sweetened with a excessive fructose sensibility. As a substitute of the creamy, polished violin tone sometimes heard in recordings and stay performances, Kuusisto gives a reedy, ramshackle sound; his violin nearly imitates a bamboo flute. You’ll be able to hear an abundance of bow hair flippantly utilized to the strings. The impact is sort of a whisper, typically so fragile that he struggles to keep up a viable tone. Kuusisto’s Lark sounds weak, like Europe will need to have felt in 1914. However it could actually additionally trill and soar excessive into the sky, an out-of-focus dot nearly previous human sight.

Kuusisto leans into The Lark‘s folksy vibe, so it is maybe a telling selection that he contains some precise folks music on the album. The Vermont singer and guitarist Sam Amidon joins for not only one, however six previous folks tunes, wearing new, evocative string preparations. His unadorned vocals, with out a hint of vibrato, lend the songs a documentarian’s authenticity, pulling you into their tales. “Manner Go, Lily,” with its mesmerizing pulse, is an previous African American call-and-response kids’s music that on the floor is playful, but additionally suggests resistance to authority. “How Come That Blood,” a homicide ballad, finds a younger man struggling to elucidate his crimson stains.

It took Kuusisto three years to make Willows, and in that span he misplaced each mother and father and his brother Jaakko — additionally a violinist and conductor. You’ll be able to hear the profound loss in Desiderium, a solo violin piece written for Kuusisto by Pulitzer winner Ellen Reid, who devoted it to Jaakko. Close to the start, there is a passage that opens with a mellifluous tune, nearly like an outtake from The Lark, however then spirals right into a type of ominous whooping cough.

The addition of music by Caroline Shaw, one other Pulitzer winner, properly matches the country aesthetic blowing via Willows. Plan & Elevation, music initially for string quartet however organized right here by the composer for string orchestra, is impressed by gardens and structure, but additionally by Ravel and Mozart. Shaw braids quotes from Ravel’s String Quartet in F and Mozart’s Quartet in G in a piece titled “The Reducing Backyard.” In “The Orangery,” minimalist arpeggios oscillate, finally sliding into “The Beech Tree,” the place pizzicato intensifies, like raindrops falling on leaves.

Pekka Kuusisto may have made a standard album, bloated with a glitzy, warhorse concerto. As a substitute, he pulls us deep into the music via the sound of his violin, his mercurial decisions and one agile creativeness.