January 23, 2026

Pathways – Profile Concert 2025

My profile concert at Tampere Hall 19.11.2025 was a dream come true! The contemporary music champion TampereRaw gave Finnish premieres of my recent chamber music. The highlight of the concert was the world premiere of my brand new piano concerto Pathways written for Anna Kuvaja, who gave a truly magical premiere of this beautiful yet highly demanding piece.

I’ve written a few works that have a life outside of Finland, but never seem to land in my home country. I wanted to do something about it, and while collaborating with TampereRaw in 2024, the idea of bringing some of them to Finland started to form. I’m very grateful for the artistic director of the ensemble Anna Angervo who immediately was very positive about our collaboration. It was an absolute honour for me to have the opportunity to work with the ensemble and to have a whole concert of my works brought to life in the wonderful setting of Tampere Hall. The concert was a co production between TampereRaw, Tampere Hall and myself. For a composer these collaborations give a chance of existing and an opportunity to be heard – bringing my own voice into the conversation of what is contemporary in the arts as well as in life.

The new concert series, a collaboration between TampereRaw and Tampere Hall Ajan ääni – The Sound of Now started with my profile concert on the 19th November 2025. For such an event I thought I didn’t want to overload it with a heavy setup of complex works, but wanted to concentrate on the different aspects of my music – the playfulness, lightness in contrast with darker, heavier music and serious themes. A combination of the inner world of thoughts and the more expressive outside.

Each Breath for flute/bass is designed to travel in space. With the flutist Marianne Järvinen we created a choreography for it to suit the Tampere Hall. This very subtle piece with very many shades and colours felt natural as Marianne gave an insightful yet virtuostic interpretation of the piece. Island for solo violin, interpreted exquisitly by Maija Wesslund was yet another piece with very subtle nuances and shades. Before the concert I felt slightly anxious about showing such subtle works, and not using any amplification for them in the hall. However, as the rehearsals started and the pieces worked marvelously in the acoustics, I was very happy about this decision.

Mikko Raasakka rooted the contrabass clarinet and electronics piece in the universe everyth ng is a circle into a strong highly nuanced bass and the sonorious different shades that it produced in the live electronics part. The piece had a stellar premiere at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2024, and now it has landed in Finland – and what a strong impact it creates! You may find a recording of it online, however in the concert setting it is truly overwhelmingly rich as the sound poures in from all sides.

I could not be happier about the premiere of my new piano concerto Pathways, performed by Anna Kuvaja, piano and TampereRaw, conducted by Maria Itkonen. Anna mastered the solo part gracefully and was able to highlight the very subtle nuances as well as strong and virtuoso moments of the piece. The form unfolded in time in a very natural way and formed a compelling continuum, a space in time. I’m a composer-researcher who is out to find fascinating new properties and points of views in creating sound. I find that writing contemporary music for a larger setup requires a tactic that is both musician friendly and does not have an impact on the musical style or the quest of researching the sound. For me a useful way of tackling these problematics is to write a solo part that is highly demanding, completely faithful to the my inner sonic image, and is pushing the instrument into a new domain of sound (the research aspect). TampereRaw did an amazing job on the accompaniment, and I have to say that I think it worked very well in being both musician friendly as well as faithful to my inner sonic image of the piece. Writing for piano is not easy for a composer like me, who enjoys the timbral sound world much more than the pitch-harmony side of it. Yet the bell like harmonies based on the perfect forths, multiphonics on the piano and noisy delicate sounds without pitch forming the tapestry of the piano writing give this concerto a sound of its own.

Jari Juhani Kallio wrote an insightful review of the concert:

“Given in a premiere outing of intense spiritual focus and praiseworthy technical merit, Pathways was rendered with detailed expressivity by Kuvaja and the musicians of TampereRaw under Itkonen. Marvelously aligned in time and space, the solo part and the ensemble fabric unraveled with organic continuity and pristine clarity, serving Hynninen’s engrossing concertante dramaturgy with ever-insightful musicality.”

“A notable new concerto, Pathways succeeds in harnessing diverse instrumental techniques into expressive musical tableaux staying true to the medium while exploring whole new arrays of sonority and color. This relatively compact piece would make an ideal touring vehicle – far and wide may it travel.” AIM - Adventures in Music

Photo credit: Patrik Stenström