Wind Quintet op. 96

Kimmo Hakola's Wind Quintet op. 96 (2017) was commissioned by the Kimito Island Music Festival. The composer sees that making the ensemble ultimately breathe and express itself as an organic, coherent subject should be the aim in composing for wind quintet. "The normal chamber-music configuration is not a sufficient basis for me in composing a wind quintet: the instruments have to be compressed, reduced, even crushed together so that, in pairs and different combinations, they produce new, viable audio units. Collision often generates something new."

Kimmo Hakola has gone through a number of styles and influences in his career as a composer, his idiom expanding at times to embrace Romanticism, Orientalism and klezmer. He has attained international recognition with an output that spans various genres from intimate solo works to full-length operas such as La Fenice (2011) commissioned by the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Many of his works are expansive and epic: his Piano Concerto (1996), for instance, clocks in at 55 minutes. Hakola says that he sees music as drama. His dramas explore almost Shakespearean extremes, from moments of raging sound and fury and violent battles to quiet moments of meditation and heart-rending monologues.