It used to be that "unknown" and especially "modern" music was too expensive to experiment for record collectors, having to pay so much to explore music that is generally -- and unfairly -- labelled as "atonal, unfriendly, dissonant", among the more polite accusations. But now we have Naxos, *the* budget label, systematically recording whole ouevres of composers hitherto unknown to the public. So throw your wallet-defined excuses aside and taste some of the quirky, eye-popping, sweet-sour, jaw-dropping, just plain "hah?" kind of music that is available from one of the most prolific periods of music history -- [trumpets flourish] the Twentieth Century! (Hurry! Hurry! Only two years left!)

AULIS SALLINEN (left) is one of Finland's most famous contemporary composers, which the Finns have been blessed with in large numbers (Rautaavara, Aho, Lindberg, Kaipainen, Englund, Bergman, etc. just to name the living ones). In 1976 he was bestowed a professorship by the Finnish government and is internationally well-known for his operas. Sallinen's music is mostly tonal and melodious, as much of the music on this disc demonstrates.

During one of his first trips to Singapore, Okko Kamu (the SSO's principal guest conductor), conducted a performance of the Sunrise Serenade, in which two trumpets, spaced apart in the hall (one was in the upper balconies) answered each other with a simple theme, developed through the short work. Its mood is mostly restrained, though optimistic, almost rhapsodic in quality, like a sunrise, which is a movement rather than a fixed occurence.

Some Aspects of Peltoniemi Hintrik's Funeral March begins the disc, an intimate work with strong oriental overtones in its opening theme which undergoes several variations. Don't be put off by the dark, ominous opening as the 1981 string arrangement proves to be quite hypnotic, a quality which Sallinen often achieves. There is a playful section in the middle, played with strings pizzicato. Chamber Music I is similar in mood, ranging between episodes of intense wrenching admonitions to the quiet, melancholic, even desolate soundscape of the end.

Playfulness resurfaces in The Nocturnal Dances of Don Juanquixote, effectively a cello concerto written as an afterthought to his composition of the opera The King Goes Forth to France (cool title huh?). The "afterthought" quality does show in the way Sallinen has the orchestra and cello hint at the dancing melody, which peeks through the score another time before, heralded by a guitar-like introduction (1'48"), the sunny and really very funny theme on solo cello comes out skipping. The 19-minute work is both dark in a caricaturist/absurdist manner but also hypnotically passionate in other sections, ending quietly and abruptly, vanishing into the darkness. Watch out for the tango bits too!

Chamber Music II is scored for alto flute (playing lower than the normal flute) and string orchestra. Again there is an intimate and dark, misty quality to the work, whose material emerges gradually from the mists and then subsides again into the darkness. In this work, one can see the visual quality of Sallinen's music in the way the sounds evoke a rather mysterious sense of things moving in the mists.

The entirely Finnish cast of performers plays excellently, as culturally "authentic" as you can get, I suppose. They are both intimate as well as spirited (I still get a big kick out of the full-blown dances in Nocturnal Dances), and are well-recorded in Naxos's now consistently quiet and full sound.