Browse: Aho (composer)

Big, hymnlike tunes emerge from straining and urgent textures, and like so much Finnish music, this is not afraid to look into the abyss. — Gramophone Magazine, January 2024 More…

The works are markedly different in character, yet both exhibit an underlying enigmatic quality against which an array of moods and textures are explored through an ever-changing post-tonal sound-world.... — BBC Music Magazine, March 2022, 4 out of 5 stars (Performance) / 5 out of 5 stars (Recording) More…

Those who cherish earlier versions of Neilsen's masterpiece… will know how deep this music runs and how haunting it is. The young Swedish clarinettist give what I must say is the most searching... — BBC Music Magazine, July 2007, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Currie, for whom Sieidi was written, delivers a knockout account with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Dima Slobodeniouk...The Symphony, similarly intense and explosive, is a yet more ambitious... — BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2020, 4 out of 5 stars (Performance) / 5 out of 5 stars (Recording) More…

Like Vaughan Williams's Seventh, Aho's Twelfth is a work of immediate effect yet needs time to make its full impact. — Gramophone Magazine, October 2008 More…

Aho shows that he understands the saxophone's capabilities, inventively blending and contrasting it with the strings. — BBC Music Magazine, August 2012, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Aho’s brilliance at problem-solving and technical composition can conceal a slight lack of material carbohydrate…But there is plenteous atmosphere and much colour (however narrow the palette)... — Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2018 More…

Superb performances by Elina Vähälä and Jonathan Roozeman confirm the idiomatic nature of Aho’s writing (having tried out the solo parts himself), and Olari Elts secures a committed response... — Gramophone Magazine, May 2023 More…