I am delighted to announce that Aulis Sallinen has agreed to become a Patron of Toccata Classics, joining Vladimir Ashkenazy, John Mauceri, Osmo Vänskä and Maxim Vengerov on our letterhead – an enormous honour for a small independent label such as ours.
My friendship with Aulis goes back, I think, to a chance meeting at the bar of the Royal Festival Hall in 1980. My acquaintance with his music went back a year earlier, to when Finnish National Opera brought his opera Ratsumies (‘The Horseman’) to Sadler’s Well – and brought the house down with it. That tour – which also brought Joonas Kokkonen’s The Last Temptations – was the bridgehead that lead to the breakthrough of modern Finnish music, which had fallen into abeyance since the ‘silence of Järvenpää’ set in half a century earlier. Today’s leading names – not least Magnus Lindberg and the sorely missed Kaija Saariaho – found their path forward (at least in terms of their international acceptance) much eased by the passage of Sallinen and Kokkonen ahead of them.
My involvement with Aulis’ music deepened over the years, to the extent that CPO asked me to write the booklet texts to their series of recordings of his orchestral music – all except that for The Barrabas Dialogues, where the music was of such personal significance that Aulis wanted to write the text himself.
There are now quite a number of recent Sallinen works that have not yet been recorded, and I’m trying to get a recording project off the ground. I’d welcome help – financial or organisational – from anyone who wants to get involved.
I end with the request that you put 9 April in your diary, so that you remember to wish Aulis a happy 90th birthday!
Kippis!
