Guards Band

The Guards Band bring their Töölö contemporary music concert series to the Tampere Biennale. Conducted by Aino Koskela, the programme consists of Finnish wind music written in the 2000s.

Meeting Points (2019) by Minna Leinonen (b. 1977) was jointly commissioned by the Pirkanmaa Music Institute and the Vakka-Suomi Music Institute for their respective anniversaries. In this piece, various instruments demonstrate their individual characteristics, join in sections and support each other. The analogy for this merger of tutti, sections and solos was the colourful and cordial Pirkanmaa Music Institute community, which has been an important meeting place for the composer in the course of her life.

Kiiruna by Roope Mäenpää (b. 1990) is a tone poem for symphonic wind band, premiered in Tampere in 2015. “The interface between humans and nature is seldom as tangible as in the historical county of Norrbotten in northern Sweden on a summer night. The midnight sun is in the sky, wilderness gives way to a mining village, brutal gaping pits incised into the terrain as if by a surgeon’s scalpel but on a massive scale. In a Fiat Ducato trundling towards morning, three people feel not small but speechless.”

Music for “Old Europe” by Olli Virtaperko (b. 1973) was written for the Klangspuren festival in a tiny town in Austria. The title pays homage to the extensive history of ‘Old European’ civilisation, and its music harks back to classical counterpoint. However, the piece also looks away from the old and away from Europe, establishing a dialogue between past and future.

Gran Duo (2000) by Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958) is a dialogue for brass and woodwind. The characteristics of the two instrument groups gradually blend in the course of the work, and their stereotypically masculine and feminine traits are blurred. A grand orchestral sound gives way to chamber music and soloist textures. This is one of the internationally best known Finnish works for wind instruments.

Samurain tie [Way of the Samurai] by Juha Pisto (b. 1966) is a five-movement song cycle for baritone and wind orchestra, setting texts from Hagakure [Way of the Samurai] by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a book first published in Japan in the early 18th century, in Finnish translations by Jaakko Anhava. The songs are a vivid and at times humorous description of the philosophy, values and practices of the Japanese knights known as the samurai.