Kari Kriikku

“The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra partner Kriikku admirably in this enchanting concerto and under Oramo's sensitive direction provide beguiling accompaniments for Anu Komsi in the four Leino Songs...[Laterna magica] is a filigree tone-poem with a soul of steel that showcases the Finnish orchestra splendidly. Ondine's demonstration sound caps a marvellous issue.” Gramophone Magazine, December 2011

“The performance quality, with the composer and two of his longest-standing collaborators, is unimpeachable and Ondine's radiant sound completes a superb issue.” Gramophone Magazine, December 2012

“the music seems to combine Lindberg's newly acquired expressive generosity with the harmonic logic and lucidity that's always been characteristic of his work.” The Guardian, 20th September 2012 ***

“If you haven’t yet encountered Uljas Pulkkis, the 35-year-old Finnish composer, give this maverick’s music a whirl. Tales of Joy, Passion and Love is his clarinet concerto for the insouciantly brilliant Kari Kriikku. Not only does it send the soloist whirring through melodramatic musical adventures, it also requires the orchestra’s clarinets to join him in a holy trinity” The Times, 16th July 2011 ****

“[Missa] gives Kriikku the chance to display all his tricks, from multiphonics to multi-tonguing, and from one extreme of register to the other, with quarter tones thrown in along the way...[Vie] generates some very striking textures within a formal scheme that manages to be both satisfying and quietly unconventional at the same time.” The Guardian, 25th November 2010 ***

“Krikkuu's account of the solo part in Missa is astonishing, but that's par for the course with this amazing musician. Almost as ear-awakening is the whipcrack virtuosity that John Storgårds gets from his Helsinki musicians. Ondine's recorded sound is first-rate too.” International Record Review, January 2011

“His 40-minute Clarinet Concerto is a riotous assortment of styles: Balkan or Yiddish folk music, modern jazz and jagged modernism, rock music and the Classical parlour piece… It's all done, and performed, with such élan that it's hard not to enjoy the vitality...” BBC Music Magazine, March 2006 *****

“…the exuberant Clarinet Concerto (2001)… is a real sit-up-and-take-notice piece, built on a very large scale - more than 38 minutes in this riveting account, played with scintillating virtuosity but its dedicatee, Kari Kriikku - with four movements and an enormous expressive range. The couplings are no less involving, Kriikku providing a vigorous account of the unaccompanied short Diamond Street, the orchestra a most entertaining rendition of Hakola's Verdoyances crépuscules (2004), a single-span Ivesian tone-poem full of conflicting idioms...” Gramophone Magazine, May 2006

“Kari Kriikku's basic tone is light and fluid, his articulation and dynamics inventively varied.
In the first movement of the Mozart he finds a hint of playfulness amid the music's familiar autumnal lyricism, enhanced by witty, spontaneous- sounding touches of ornamentation. But with his acute sensitivity to harmonic flux, he never underestimates the moments where the music seems to turn in on itself: say, in the shift to A minor in the first-movement recapitulation (for which he finds a haunting, withdrawn new colour), or in the melancholy shadows that flit across the bubbling surface of the finale.
Under John Storgårds, the Tapiola Sinfonietta (with violins properly divided left and right) provide typically polished, stylish support, and shape even apparently routine accompanying figures like the oscillating quavers in the Adagio with finesse.
Kriikku swaps basset-clarinet for a stratospheric D clarinet in three concertos by Johann Melchior Molter, written in the late 1740s when the clarinet was still in its infancy. The music, often sounding like a cross between Vivaldi and CPE Bach at his most complaisant, is agreeable, if hardly distinctive. But Kriikku draws miracles of delicate shading from his piercing, trumpet-like instrument, whether in the bouncy Allegros (though you may be fazed by his jokily over-the-top cadenza in the finale of No 4), or in the soulful minor-key slow movements of Nos 1 and 4.
In both Mozart and Molter, Ondine's recorded sound has an attractive transparency and glow, with an ideally judged balance between clarinet and orchestra.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“There have been first-rate recordings of the Mozart concerto on the basset-clarinet, with its wonderfully oily additional low notes, from, inter alia, Dame Thea King, Michael Collins and Wolfgang Meyer. Kriikku is at least their equal in vitality, subtlety and poetic insight. His basic tone is light and fluid, his articulation and dynamics inventively varied. In the first movement he finds a hint of playfulness amid the music's familiar autumnal lyricism, enhanced by witty, spontaneous-sounding touches of ornamentation. Kriikku swaps basset-clarinet for a stratospheric D clarinet in three concertos by Johann Melchior Molter, written in the late 1740s when the clarinet was still in its infancy. ...Kriikku draws miracles of delicate shading from his piercing, trumpet-like instrument... Ondine's recorded sound has an attractive transparency and glow... with an ideally judged balance between clarinet and orchestra.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2006