Every so often a new recording lands that reminds me why I fell in love with chamber music in the first place - not the polish of a solo showpiece, but the conversation between musicians who trust one another completely. The latest release in cellist Nicolas Altstaedt's ongoing Lockenhaus Festival series does exactly that, and it puts a composer-pianist right at its heart.
A festival captured on disc
Heavenly Lights arrives on Alpha Classics as the fifth volume in the Lockenhaus Festival series, under Altstaedt's artistic direction. The programme centres on two works by the Finnish composer Olli Mustonen, born in 1967 and a student of Rautavaara, with the composer himself at the piano alongside Altstaedt and tenor Ian Bostridge. Recordings drawn from a working festival tend to carry a particular electricity, and this one is no exception.
What makes the disc unusual is Mustonen's dual role. He is one of those rare artists whose life as a composer and his life at the keyboard are inseparable, and hearing him play his own music is a chance to catch a creative mind in the act of listening to itself.
The title work
The centrepiece is Taivaanvalot, translated as Heavenly Lights, scored for tenor, cello and piano. Bostridge first premiered the work in 2016 in its original chamber version, and it is recorded here for the first time in that form. Mustonen later expanded it into an orchestral Sinfonia in 2020, yet the original piece is itself titled Symphony.
The subject matter reaches deep into Nordic myth. Altstaedt describes being immersed in the world of Finnish bards and the folk poems of the Kalevala, a legendary and mystical realm whose stories, he suggests, touch us regardless of where we come from. One reviewer noted a nice coincidence of timing: the album appeared just days after a solar eclipse dazzled much of western Europe, and Mustonen's title work concerns the sun and the moon, or rather their absence, their light returning only after a journey through darkness, bell-strokes and elemental struggle.
Kodaly as kindred spirit
The album's Finnish material sits beside music by Zoltan Kodaly, and the pairing is inspired rather than arbitrary. The programme includes Kodaly's Cello Sonatina and his Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 4, alongside Mustonen's own four-movement Cello Sonata. Altstaedt points to the closeness to folk art that Kodaly sought and found, a thread that binds these composers across a century.
Critics have responded warmly to the playing. One review praised how Altstaedt relishes the writing's extremes, drawing a wiry pianissimo one moment and a fiercely focused, almost orchestral sonority the next. The same writer observed that Mustonen's chordal writing can be blunt, even dogged, but in performance its insistence becomes theatrical, with the finale's ascent dispatched with exhilarating conviction. As for the engineering, the recording, made in Lockenhaus's Parish Church, is warmly resonant yet full of presence, with Bostridge naturally balanced against both instruments.
Why it matters
For me, the real pleasure of a disc like this is the reminder that the piano is at its most alive in company. So much of my own concert life is spent in dialogue - with singers, with string players, with the silence of an attentive hall - and a project like Heavenly Lights shows what happens when three strong personalities agree to serve a shared vision. The composer-pianist tradition, from Bartok to Mustonen, keeps that spirit honest.
If this recording stirs your appetite for chamber music heard up close, I would love to welcome you to one of my own recitals and collaborations. You can explore upcoming concerts and enquire about bookings at yinghopiano.com. There is nothing quite like a room where the music is made in front of you, one shared breath at a time.
