Laura Mikkola News
Finnish pianist
Anniversaries 1974 Anniversaries (Birth: Laura Mikkola)
- piano
- Finland
- pianist, teacher, politician
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2024-04-21
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2024-01-12 07:27:00
Byrd Compared: Phantasm & Anna Prohaska celebrate the consort song
Byrd Compared: Byrd and English Song; Anna Prohaska, Phantasm; Wigmore HallReviewed 10 January 2024A programme celebrating the sheer diversity of William Byrd's consort songs, rendered with commitment and absolute identification by Anna Prohaska.The consort song was a peculiarly English form from the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a solo voice accompanied by viols and the form continued alongside the Italian madrigal and the lute song. Viol consorts were a sociable, private thing, groups of friends would gather for such, which meant that the consort song was a similar sort of event, definitely more for the parlour than anything more public.For their concert at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 10 January 2023, Byrd Compared: Byrd and English Song, the viol consort Phantasm (Laurence Dreyfus, Jonathan Manson, Emilia Benjamin, Markku Luolajan-Mikkola) had clearly decided to mix things up somewhat and presented a programme of consort songs, not with a familiar specialist singer, […]
2022-02-22 07:34:17
Phantasm completes its survey of all John Jenkins's viol consorts with a disc of his four-part consorts on Linn
[…] country with a number of Royalist patrons, and ended his life with a court position after the Restoration. He wrote extensive amounts music for viols and was a noted virtuoso on the lyra viol. The viol consort Phantasm has been exploring Jenkins music for viols and having recorded his five-part and six-part consorts, Phantasm has now recorded John Jenkins' Four-part consorts on LINN records. For the disc Phantasm (Laurence Dreyfus, Jonathan Manson, Emilia Benjamin, Markku Luolajan-Mikkola) are joined by Daniel Hyde (organ). There are 19 works on the disc, 17 Fantasies, and two Pavans, music that was largely composed in the 1620s. This is highly civilised music and complex. Jenkins does not have the quirky imagination of his friend and colleague William Lawes, and instead is interested in the busy interplay of four parts. But that is not to say that the music is conventional. You don't go away […]
2020-01-18 10:08:25
Bach Round-Up: violin, piano, organ, recorder, viol, choral and orchestra by Bach and his cousin Johann Bernard
[…] their performances from memory, make their debut recording on Sony Classical, Christmas in Leipzig which features the original Christmas version Bach's Magnificat plus Christmas music by two of his predecessors in Leipzig. Our final disc is a different Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach's cousin, Johann Bermard Bach whose surviving orchestral suites are played by Thüringer Bach Collegium on Audite. The Well-Tempered Consort - IJohann Sebastian BachPhantasm (Laurence Dreyfus, Emilia Benjamin, Jonathan Manson, Heidi Gröger, Markkus Luolajan-Mikkola), with Liam Byrne (bass viol)LINN CKD 618 1CD [66:55]Released 31 January 2020This disc is not quite what you might expect from the title. Whilst the majority of pieces on the disc are arrangements of movements from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, not all of them are. So we start with Ricercar a3 from The Musical Offering, and other examples from Inventions and Sinfonias, the Prelude and Fugue in C major BWV 547, and Clavier-Ubung III. […]
2016-02-25 19:45:27
Markku Luolajan-Mikkola (Linn) Bach’s six solo Sonatas and Partitas might be sacrosanct for violinists – the instrument’s Himalayas, George Enescu called them – but they’re regularly pinched by violists, lutenists, mandolinists and others. So why not baroque cellists? Phantasm’s Markku Luolajan-Mikkola sternly takes up the challenge on a 1700 instrument, and answers his own question along the way: it’s tough going. Nimble passages (the Second Partita’s Gigue) and chunky, double-stopped passages (the Second Sonata’s mighty Fugue) sound like hard graft, but Luolajan-Mikkola is nothing if not resolute, and he seems to embrace the struggle as an expressive end in itself. His staunch approach to articulation is tricky to love, but the payoff comes in the slow movements: Sarabandes sung low and husky, unadorned, flawed and beautiful. The recording was made in a medieval church on the south coast of Finland, and the big reverb provides a warmth that is occasionally […]
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