Lux Musicae Festival, since 2000, which has combined the darkness of November with the light of music. When Siuntio celebrated its 560th birthday last year, Lux Musicae decided to support creative work and give a musical gift to Siuntio as a form of the composition competition.
The winner of the chamber music series is composer Tomi Räisänen with his work Tele. Earlier this year, Räisänen was awarded for his work Hile composed for the Tampere Piano Competition. The chairman of the jury, composer Kimmo Hakola, believes that Tele will remain in the history of Finnish music due to his ingenuity.
Tele, composed for seven players and television, is strongly associated with the Covid-19 era. The work is like an intermittent video conference, described by the composer himself: … ”the distance of the players and the lack of eye contact cause distortions and inaccuracies in musical communication; playing together becomes difficult and the performance changes into aleatory fragments. ”
The work will be premiered at the Lux Musicae festival on November 19, 2021.
The compositions of Paavo Korpijaakko, who lives in Naantali, are regularly heard at Finnish music festivals. He describes his second-prize-winning work, Cats Go Crazy On The Moonshine, as follows: ” I arranged a slightly different song for the cats: a day-long bakkanal, where they get drunk, dance, suffer (because of hangover), and finally everyone wants to get the last drop of the drink.”
The third prize was awarded to church musician Niels Burgmann‘s A Light Exists in Spring and Lohja City Orchestra’s double bassist Peter Grans Meditation Lux, which Grans has dedicated to St. Peter’s Church in Siuntio. Throughout the history, people have, according to Grans, “experienced distressing times (shadows) and happy times (light).” There is a comforting hymn between the parts of the work.
Burgmann was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem while composing the work for the competition. He was born in Germany, grew up in Sweden and worked as a church musician in various congregations in Finland. He says he loves the organ!
The jury ended up recommending the works of Sami Klemola‘s Lux in Umbra and Teemu Halmkrona´s The four seasons of Siuntio to be performed at the festival. Klemola is known for his electronic music and he is the driving force behind the defunensemble. Halmkrona is not only a composer but also a keyboardist, whose works have been performed by e.g. UMO and also other jazz ensembles.
