This collection features chamber music by Finnish composer Ilari Kaila (b.1978), with the Aizuri Quartet joined by pianist Adrienne Kim. The compositions were written 2003-2017. The title piece, The Bells Bow Down (2006), pays homage to a deceased friend, pianist Hanna Sarvala. This one-movement piano quintet relies on bell-tone sonorities. Much of Kaila’s music remains within the tonal system, adding percussive and other expressive effects related to the Natural world or to aural and visual imagery from his experiences.
1. The Bells Bow Down opens with a drone effect, until the piano shatters the idyll. The music becomes agitated, pained, strident, the cello part in collision with the piano. The music rises to a piano cadenza, appassionato, over vibrating strings, turning into a nocturne in half steps that the strings interrupt in fragmentary riffs. The agitated impulse returns, the piano in heavy, tolling chords, all moving in dissonant, scalar crescendo to the coda.
2. Cameo (2015) is a 3-part trio for flute, viola, and piano. The opening
indulges in asymmetrical phrases in flute and piano, the viola part, ostinato in open fifths. The model lies in the music of India, where terse raga motifs confront each other, while the rhythm (tala) provides the sense of continuity. Some influence from the British group Jethro Tull may be detected. The middle section centers on a repeated middle C on the piano. The music accelerates gradually like a march with a virtuoso flute part, only to culminate in a delicatissimo passage that recalls the opening material.
3. Hum and Drum (2017) is a cello sonata in the form of a rondo. The cello plays in high register and harmonics to open, over a repeated piano riff. Irregular metrics in both parts increase the tension, despite the secure C Major tonality. Kaila exploits the cello’s tones and textures, its pizzicato, col legno (on the wood), tremolo, double stops, and glissando (sliding) effects, sometimes more percussive than lyrical. In the 2nd section, the piano’s extreme high and lower register sound ominous. In the final 90 seconds, he cello and piano next indulge in heavy, punishing riffs that yield to a melodic arco in the cello over piano ostinato. The coda, however, becomes obsessive, finally passing away from exhaustion.
4. Wisteria (2003) for String Quartet refers to a climbing vine, the metaphor for the music’s structure, which opens in monody, one voice line from the violin, that soon becomes absorbed by the ensemble polyphonically. Open and parallel fifths dominate the harmonic texture, which at times becomes quite emotionally expressive. Classically constructed, the music plays against its one inversion, with intimate play between the violins over long notes in the cello. At times, the repetitions, even the trills, sound Baroque, with suspensions urging the music quietly forward. The piece ends on a sustained harmony in trills. (6:21)
5-9. Taonta (2016) is a five-movement suite for solo piano. 5.Sarabande is a Spanish dance in a meditative 3/2 in diatonic, white-note, harmony.
6. Rosary begins in thick arpeggios, a combination of Bach and Debussy. The dynamics increase and decrease in “pinched” motions of sforzatos. The motion assumes a sweeping gesture that soon dies out quietly.
7. Xianwei: Tail-Biting Fish takes its cue from Chinese music, wherein the last note of one piece becomes the first note of the next, each “fish” bites the tail of the next. Bass five-note chords provide the foundation for improvised riffs of quasi-melody, set in pairs that “bite” one another. The motion is very slow but illuminated, perhaps an image of koi or pond-fish drifting in the water.
8. Taonta is a Finnish word meaning “hammering” or “forging.” The fourth piece of the suite moves in percussive martellando gestures, with irregular accents, suggestive of bells in Maurice Ravel, Mussorgsky, or Debussy’s gamelan imitations. The registers climb, sounding on a single tone over a short riff, then all disappear.
9. The Caudal Fin is a playful modification of the Cameo movement, here using monody and silent, depressed keys held sostenuto, and the “broken” style of arpeggios in Rosary and its imitations of J.S. Bach. Once more, Debussy seems the model for the modal progress of the piece, which exploits various piano registers and sonorities in short spurts or gestures. The last page speeds and then hesitates to a diminished, then silent coda.
10. Jouhet (2017) for String Quartet celebrates the centenary of modern Finland, with the title invoking rustic, Finnish history in the sound of the jouhikko, the lyre of strings and horsehairs. The viola has the dominant part, offering a two-voice motif over the open G of the ensemble. The dance proper hops and gallops in stringent, modal harmony. Violin and cello soon accompany the viola in a new tempo. The texture thickens with active intensity, and the degrees of surge and retreat provide the means of progress. Moments of folksy lyricism and relative calm appear amid the busy, often hectic, gestures.