compositions

Instrumentation: cello
Publisher: Chester Music Limited
First performance: Anssi Karttunen, cello, Time of Music Festival, Viitasaari, Finland, 23 July 1987
Click here to buy the CD

Programme Notes:
Salonen: ‘I began to work on the Yta series in 1982. The first piece was for solo alto flute, the second for piano (rev. for harpsichord) and the third for cello. The title Yta is Swedish, and means ‘surface’. I wanted to write very demanding virtuoso music, where the surface is extremely busy, but the formal process, partly hidden behind the frenetic stream of fast gestures, is considerably slower.

Yta III is the only instrumental work of mine with any kind of programmatic content. I tried to imagine what happens to the famous moth, that circles around a lamp in Skryabin’s Vers a flamme, after the wings have finally touched the flame. A series of gestures is introduced in the beginning. Each gesture undergoes an individual development, culminating in spasms before dying away. Yta III is a study of the death of an organism; the ugliest and most violent piece I’ve written.’
© Esa-Pekka Salonen

Kimmo Korhonen: ’This last movement, like its two predecessors, demands a virtuoso performer and has a continuous forward drive. There is also something desperate in its relentlessness; the cello here is not a queen of cantilena but, to quote Salonen’s metaphor, like a dragonfly trying to take off with burnt wings.’
© Kimmo Korhonen 1999 (tranlated by Jaakko Mäntyjärvi)