Program
Magnus Lindberg:

• Dos Coyotes (2002) for cello and piano
• Jubilees (2000) for solo piano
• Partia for solo cello
• Etudes I and II (2001 and 2004 respectively) for solo piano
• Konzertstück (2006) for cello and piano
• Arrangements of movements from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella for cello and piano

About the Music
Jubilees is a set of six piano works, the first of which was commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall in London as a birthday tribute to Pierre Boulez in 2000. Lindberg immediately continued the series and the whole set was completed before the year was out.

Partia, written as a commission of the Turku Cello Competition, is a large suite in six movements. The name has its roots in the original manuscript of Bach's Partitas for violin in which he uses the old Italian title Partia. The piece has no direct structural similarity with the baroque Suites, which often consisted of an Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet or Bourree and Gigue. Some textures are in some way vaguely reminiscent of their namesakes, and the names of the movements are borrowed from a period before Bach's time.

Etude I, premiered by Jay Gottlieb at the Octobre en Normandie festival 2001, is like an extension of Jubilees, even if not related to it. Lindberg wrote it immediately before Partia for cello, which explains certain similar textural ideas. Etude II was written for the 60th birthday of pianist Paul Crossley, who premiered it in 2004 in London.

Konzertstück was written in July 2006 and is a co-commission of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and La Jolla Summerfest. Karttunen and Lindberg gave the world premiere in Santa Fe in 2006, taking it then to La Jolla, Brussels and Strasbourg. Lindberg wrote this piece in a short time immediately after finishing his Violin Concerto. The piece is divided into three movements which follow each other without break. It is a piece of great architectural dimensions lasting about 14 minutes, making it the most substantial of Lindberg's cello-piano pieces.

About the Artists
Composer/pianist Magnus Lindberg's decade of collaboration with immensely talented and versatile Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen dates to the 1999 world premiere of Lindberg’s Cello Concerto commissioned by the Orchestre de Paris. The two hit it off and began a regular composing and performing partnership.

Lindberg originally composed Dos Coyotes (2002) as a song cycle for children’s chorus in 1993. In preparing for a recital tour with Karttunen, the composer realized an arrangement of the engaging work would be the perfect addition to the repertoire and finished the work just in time for the tour.

Lindberg’s compositional breakthrough came with two large-scale works, Action-Situation-Signification (1982) and Kraft (1983-85), which were linked with his founding with Esa-Pekka Salonen of the experimental Toimii Ensemble. This group, in which Lindberg plays piano and percussion, has provided the composer with a laboratory for his sonic development. His works at this time combined experimentalism, complexity and primitivism, working with extremes of musical material. During the late 1980s, his music transformed into a new modernist classicism, in which many of the communicative ingredients of a vibrant musical language (harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, melody) were reinterpreted anew for the post-serial era. His work has evolved into a sophisticated yet accessible mix of harmonic lushness and rhythmic complexity.

Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen is a versatile and dynamic artist who plays traditional cello, classical and baroque cellos and the diminutive violoncello piccolo. At home in the standard repertoire, he excels at contemporary music and is an avid collaborator with composers. His associations have resulted in more than 50 premieres written for or given by him from composers including Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Rolf Wallin, Luca Francesconi and Tan Dun.