Aho, Kalevi: String quartet no. 2

Kalevi Aho's (b. 1949) second string quartet dates from February 1970, when he was in his second year as a student of Eino-Juhani Rautavaara at the Sibelius Academy. Its premiere in the debut concert of the Finlandia Quartet in the Sibelius Academy concert series on 18 November 1970 also marked Aho's debut as a composer, since it was the first performance of a work by him at a public concert. The quartet is in three movements. The composer tells: "I tried to regulate the composition's formal structure according to ‘psychological' principles. The first movement freezes around the middle, but once it has recovered from this paralysing stage, it is free to go wild in the second movement in a top-speed Presto. I also tried to create the impression that the very quick and structurally complex Presto is ultimately just surface decoration for the slow, gentle flow - the undercurrents that are, during the second movement, only ostensibly inaudible."