Arto “Mamba” Koskinen’s forgotten masterpiece Fuga Indiana was recorded: the result is a five-star record and the crown of a lifetime’s work

North Indian, Classical, African American / Album

Koskinen: Fuga Indiana. Joonas Ahonen, piano. Alpha.

★★★★★

Initially hit blank for a while. Arto Koskinendid you cry?

Oh yes, “Mamba” Koskinen, of course, a musician who has absorbed many genres and cultures.

Finnish winter war 1939–1940 band album Underground-rock delighted in 1970, although at that time I had not yet noticed Arto Koskinen’s name. Koskinen has been involved in many, including Sähköquartet and others MA Numminen in assemblies as well as by Pepe Willberg In the Jormas band. In later decades, the Middle-Earth Band and Karuna have been their own bands.

The first study trip to India was in 1973, and at the end of the three-year study in 1977, Koskinen completed a final degree in Indian classical vocal music in New Delhi.

Koskinen’s life mission has been to bring North Indian classical music, Western polyphonic compositional tradition and African-American improvised music together into a great synthesis. His goal has been to find “one great logic of beauty”.

Nearly one hour long, composed for piano Fuga indiana is the crown of this endeavor. The premiere of a work in progress between 1987 and 2000 Joonas Ahonen 2003.

Fugitive Indian the central condition is meditativeness. The goal is not a tense clearing towards a solution, but being – sinking deep inward or opening up to an ecstasy that embraces the world. The melodies that rotate the notes back and forth reach up to the smallest parts and imitate and modify each other.

Even though the melodrama is wildly virtuosic in some places, it doesn’t succumb to the trappings of heroism. The description is a fugue that begins very seriously, but as the note values ​​shorten, it accelerates, narrows, heats up and, after spreading over the entire keyboard, suddenly evaporates into a meditative stop.

On a spiritual level Fugitive Indian could be a reference point J. S. Bachin Goldberg Variations, Frederic Rzewskin variant set The People United Will Never Be Defeated! this by La Monte Young which transforms in every performance The Well-Tuned Piano. Also Keith Jarrettin The Köln Concert and other big solo concerts come to mind.

Indian escape there are seven movements divided into seventeen subsections: fugue, canons, and a freely imitative polyphonic texture.

Jonas Ahonen plays very precisely and faithfully to the notes, tastes the colors of the mixed notes and rises to an ecstatic rhythmic repetition, making the piano hum powerfully, deeply and clearly. At the end, gently speaking tones appear and with the front notes, the grace of the French baroque.

Koskinen recorded himself Fugitive Indian 2005 (Amanita). On an aggressively close-mixed record, Koskinen takes faster tempos on average. The biggest difference is in the African-American plot of the work, which Koskinen implements in a more dynamic and freer manner. The composer has the prerogative to deviate from his sheet music text.