Hakola: Diamond Street for solo clarinet

March 2006

*****

“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...”

May 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...”