“Kari Kriikku and I wrote to a bunch of Finnish composers and asked them to write duos for Clarinet and Cello. Ten composers answered the call. Suddenly there was a whole repertoire for our instru­ments. We premiered most of them on the 15th of September 1990 at the Warsaw Autumn.” Thus cellist Anssi Karttunen recalls the commissioning process for Oi Kuu (“Oh Moon”). 

 

The request came at a good moment: after almost a decade of transformative work with electronics, it was time for Saariaho to allow those influences to infuse her purely instrumental music. She had just written the aforementioned Du cristal for orchestra and electronics, and Oi Kuu therefore allowed her to explore the deconstruction of sound, the opening up of timbre, without drawing on technology. As such, she used it as an opportunity to explore what she terms the “common denominator” of the two instruments. At its heart, she poses a simple question: how similar or different can the sounds of these two instruments be?

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Joshua Ballance