Written as a gift for Avanti! Chamber Orchestra

  • fl(afl).ob(ca).cl.bn(cbn).hn
  • 12 min

Programme Note

Memoria, a wind quintet in one movement, harks back to a piece of mine from the early 1980s, ,Mimo, which I had left unfinished. In the summer of 2003 I wanted to write some chamber music before embarking on a complex and large-scale orchestral project. I found the manuscript of Mimo, over twenty years old, in my archives, and decided to finish the composition.

In the end there was almost nothing left of the old quintet: maybe some kind of a ritualistic atmosphere and some textural aspects, very little else. I rewrote every note. The fast music that gradually grows out of the slow material did not exist in Mimo at all. The basic character is serious, sometimes even sad, despite the short fast sections where the playful, flickering divertimento character (typical of the ensemble) flashes by.

The title Memoria refers to two things: partly to some sweet-and-sour memories from more than twenty years ago, and partly to the death of Luciano Berio, the great Italian composer, whose music I greatly admire. The chorale at the end is a lament to the memory of Berio, as a gesture a bit like the end of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments where Stravinsky mourns the death of his friend Debussy. For some reason, those chords in the last minute-and-a-half of Memoria have found their way into other works of mine. Some processes seem to need time.

Programme note © Esa-Pekka Salonen

Media

Salonen's MEMORIA performed by The City of Tomorrow quintet

Reviews

This is a fine piece, well-structured and musically interesting, very bitonal throughout but not trying to be purposely abrasive. Yet the music is constantly in flux, both thematically and harmonically. There’s a wonderfully complex canon in the middle and, according to the notes, “Memoria ends in memory of Berio with a homophonic chorale featuring the darker grain of alto flute, English horn and contrabassoon.” An excellent piece.

Lynn René Bayley, The Art Music Lounge
21st June 2021

The most original work of the CD is definitely that of Esa-Pekka Salonen. The great Finnish maestro logically knows his instruments far too well to commit some false ingenuity or ask the impossible.

…a very scintillating and logically built work…

Giorgio Koukl, EarRelevant
21st June 2021
… the UK premiere of one of his own recent scores. The wind quintet Memoria, from 2003, is a reworking of a 20-year-old piece, Mimo, now morphed into the sleek, suave […] style of Salonen's recent music, before ending with a short, fractured chorale in memory of Luciano Berio.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian
21st December 2006

Discography

Blow

Blow
  • Label
    New Focus Recordings
  • Catalogue Number
    FCR294
  • Ensemble
    The City of Tomorrow
  • Released
    25th June 2021