A Pekka Kuusisto Playlist

“Hi VANdals,” Pekka Kuusisto writes to us in the email with this playlist. The Finnish violinist, experimenter, and artistic director of the Meidän Festivaali (“Our Festival”) in Järvenpää, will visit his home country on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra this August, playing Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto; in September, he’ll be traveling to Germany with Ligeti’s Concerto, Jonathan Nott and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie. The latter work serves as the inspiration for this playlist. Here is Kuusisto’s introduction.“I’m doing this in some kind of strange homage to Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, because it refuses to not be on my mind. I wanted to find a bunch of YouTube links that have some resonance with different aspects of the Concerto, or that I’ve found inspiring or fun or a lovely waste of time while working on it. By now, I’ve played it enough to not be afraid of it. In the beginning, when I was learning it for the first time, there were so many violinistic challenges to tackle that a living, breathing, and singing approach to the music was hard to achieve. Fortunately, it’s a work that squeezes a better musician out of you if you give it enough love, and these days I feel like I can move inside the shapes and sounds with relative ease. It’s still a monster, but I’m riding it.”