Those who have puzzled over the precipitous rise of Klaus Mäkelä must now ponder the even more abrupt apparition of Tarmo Peltokoski, a twenty-four-year-old Finn who is actually billed as a student of Mäkelä. Although Peltokoski's accomplishments are so far minimal — he is the music director designate of the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse — he has won a Deutsche Grammophon contract and has just released his début disc, containing Mozart's Symphonies Nos. 35, 40, and 36. The orchestra is the reliably superb Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, who maintain the precise urgency that they developed under the leadership of Paavo Järvi. There's nothing especially distinctive about Peltokoski's conducting, but he seems an able technician. To that extent, he is a worthy graduate of the École de Mäkelä. In another category altogether are Peltokoski's three piano improvisations on Mozart, amounting to about sixteen minutes of music, which are distributed among the three symphonies. I actually spit out my coffee when the first of them came on. It's the kind of thing you might hear in the cocktail lounge of a very weird Viennese hotel. We're used to seeing oblivious vanity among conductors, but usually not at the very beginning of their careers.
I felt a certain dread on seeing that another recent DG release, featuring the young German pianist Julius Asal, also includes improvisatory interludes. This experiment, however, is vastly more successful. Asal has devised an unexpected and absorbing program weaving together sonatas of Scarlatti and Scriabin — composers who rarely appear in the same sentence. Asal plays each with magical clarity and an extraordinarily sensitive touch. Interpolated are two brief "Transitions" of Asal's devising, in which he meditates on the immediately preceding material and anticipates what comes next. He brings to bear a certain minimalist aesthetic, with ambiguous harmonies caught in momentary loops, yet there is no sense of a break with the surrounding material, as there certainly is with Peltokoski's smarmy riffs on Mozart. Instead, there is a wonderful feeling of suspension, of historical limbo. I'd be interested to hear more music in own Asal's voice. DG is surrounding Asal with the kind of slick marketing that it bestows on so many of its artists, but in this case the attention seems to be deserved.
