Rantala’s
roots are in jazz. He began his piano studies at the Käpylä
Music Institute and continued his studies at the Oulunkylä
Pop/Jazz Institute and the Jazz Department of the Sibelius
Academy. In 1991 he turned his attention to classical piano
at the Manhattan School of Music for two years. Rantala is
the founder and pianist of Trio Töykeät, Finland's most prominent
jazz band. They have performed in more than forty different
countries over five continents. Jazz and contemporary rub
shoulders in his music, blending, melting and reasserting
their identities.
Listening
to the 38 minute Piano Concerto Rantala’s open-minded
eclecticism is to the fore. It’s rather like listening to
Constant Lambert supercharged with the visceral-feral energy
in Percy Grainger’s The Warriors. But this is only
part of the story. The Concerto links hands with many twentieth
century exemplars including Bernstein, Gershwin’s Rhapsody
in Blue (which Rantala has performed in Finland), Rachmaninov
(a little) and Prokofiev (much more). Towards the end of the
first movement we even hear things that remind us of Malcolm
Arnold whooping it up in his Concerto for Phyllis and Cyril.
It’s a veritable collage of a work drawing on popular middle-of-the-road
culture with nary a wince or a blush. It’s clearly good fun
and if I am left wondering how much of this is due to Rantala
and how much to Kuusisto who did the orchestration perhaps
the division of creativity doesn’t matter all that much. In
the piano solo Astorale as well as in Tangonator
(violin and piano) I thought of the sharp and edgy
style of those famous Grappelli and Previn collections of
the early 1970s - all jazz, Mayerl and Palm Court with the
odd surprise thrown in such as the cackling violin in 2:40
in Tangonator. Final Fantasy is a concert-closer
played at Trio Töykeät events. It flies along at full tilt
with the RPMs close to the engine’s limit and then pauses
for a moment’s reflection and a lovely sentimental aside.
Oddly enough it had me thinking of the first movement of Walton’s
Sinfonia Concertante for piano and orchestra. A pulse-thrilling
work with a feel-good kick.
If
you go for fanciful, even dissolute adventures in the shadow-land
between jazz, popular and classical you will find this irresistible
.... and fun.
Rob
Barnett
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