Ihminen parhaan kykynsä mukaan (2023)

Before the performance, I admit I was nervous: will a piano, vibraphone and a string quartet be enough to showcase Järventausta’s wonderful orchestration skills, heard for example in his orchestral work Sunfall? Yes, they were. The delicate sonic explorations tickle the ear, particularly in the opera’s quieter passages, when the man played by Torikka contemplates his existence and his possible future…Delving deeper into the emotions, the opera begins to find truly touching qualities.

Lauri Mäntysaari – Turun Sanomat (2024, translated from Finnish)

In this new chamber opera, Joel Järventausta balances pragmatism and idealism with optimal results. The opera is unlikely to be his last...Composer Joel Järventausta got his career off to a rocketing start before his thirtieth birthday, and with this chamber or near-monologue opera he demonstrates solid craftsmanship.

Wilhelm Kvist – Hufvudstadsbladet (2024, translated from Swedish)

Bacchanale (2023)

This short piece, which lasts around five minutes, forces us to concentrate from the outset, with a brief tutti immediately followed by a mysterious atmosphere in the pianos, with a wealth of colours and contemporary sound effects. Here the Finn demonstrates his mastery of the orchestra’s resources, with a sense of flowing sequences that is always spellbinding.

Florent Coudeyrat – ConcertoNet (2024, translated from French)

This is a highly rhythmic score that makes abundant use of brass instruments (trombones and tuba) and percussion, sometimes reminiscent of Bernstein, in which we can recognise various influences borrowed from pop, Hollywood music, video game music and brass band music… A very colourful work, with a rich orchestration, in which Ainārs Rubikis gives a very committed performance, supported by precise, sharp conducting.

Patrice Imbaud – ResMusica (2024, translated from French)

Bacchanale (as this new piece is called) seems to explore a form of sonic stasis, through the use of orchestral colours and the juxtaposition of rhythms and melodic evocations. This sound gradually densifies into a rich acoustic landscape ranging from pop music to film music or even certain twentieth-century classical aesthetics (though without being explicit).

Emmanuel Deroeux – ClassyKeo (2024, translated from French)

Bourrée (2022)

Bourrée…stood out for its extraordinary tuba-and-bells sonorities and its feeling of aloof ritual.

Ivan Hewett – The Telegraph 2023

Bourrée, for brass and percussion, by Joel Järventausta began with a wistful, woozy duet for trombone and tuba, followed by a veiled, spaced out episode. A powerful climax was succeeded by a reminder of the opening duet and the music was rounded off by a raucous, jazzy, dance-like section. By turns mournful and ecstatic, the piece’s fluctuating humours were neatly characterised by the CBSO players.

Paul Conway – April-June Issue, Musical Opinion (2023)

Naava (2021)

The composer is on the rise in the world, and no wonder. Despite the short duration of Naava, you can hear that Järventausta has his own personal and uninfluenced way of combining sounds and rhythms. The music of Naava alternates between movement and sharp cuts and stillness, exploring the life of the forest sometimes from a distance, and sometimes at close range, as if from within the vegetation.

Harri Hautala – Aamulehti (2023, translated from Finnish)

Naava is a rewarding piece of contemporary music. The piece immediately draws you in with its interesting harmonic tensions, its structural contrasts and rhythmic changes creating drama and space. Well written for orchestra, the melodic textures are captivating. The only problem is that the duration is too short, but fortunately there is more to come.

Jari Hoffrén – Keskisuomalainen (2022, translated from Finnish)

Sunfall (2019-20)

Joel Järventausta emerged as a strong composer with Sunfall, which was heard in its Finnish premiere…it is interesting how he uses a fairly simple compositional “skeleton” with minor tonalitites and all kinds of “disturbing” elements added in the form of rhythmic accents and textures…Järventausta’s approach to writing for orchestra is powerful in a way that is reminiscent of John Williams, although he strikes many different tones in the work.

Wilhelm Kvist – Hufvudstadsbladet (2023, translated from Swedish)

His Sunfall, inspired by a vivid 19th-century painting of a sunset, and by Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, seemed an exceptionally assured piece of orchestral writing. It’s a fiercely concentrated, 10-minute tone poem, in which violent outbursts of brass alternate with more consoling instrumental lines, and uneasy passages of stasis.

Andrew Clements – The Guardian (2022)

The young Finn, in his mid-twenties, is clearly a composer who knows how to turn colour into sound. Blazing sunlight and ominous clouds fill his bold canvas, inspired by dramatic portrayals of sunsets in prose and paint as well as his synaesthetic response to the colour orange…Who wouldn’t want to listen to a kaleidoscope of orchestral detail, and all those beautifully played solos? The conductor François-Xavier Roth and the London Symphony Orchestra revelled in.

Rebecca Franks – The Times (2022)

Truly gripping was Sunfall by Joel Järventausta, born in 1995. The young Finn’s narration is extremely sonorous and he uses the possibilities of the orchestra for unexpected effects – right up to the end, when the clarinettists speak and the violin desks pluck high, stifled pizzicato notes.

Verena Fischer-Zernin – Hamburger Abendblatt (2022, translated from German)

Joel Järventausta’s Sunfall, apparently rooted in the composer’s synaesthetic response to the colour orange, made for an impressive opening piece, subdued first chords swiftly, rudely interrupted by a cataclysmic orchestral clap. That and other such contrasts in material were worked out in an atmosphere of unease and natural-world majesty. A keen ear for matching timbre and harmony, and for lone, fragile melodic against that atmospheric backdrop imparted a sense of the ultimate amorality of the sun and its light: it can give life, but it can also take it away. Increasing animation, even frenzy, returned us to a transformed wilderness. Chatter at its close—musical, yet speech—enhanced the enigma, but also the unapproachability of that giant fireball now departed.

I do not think it would do Sunfall any disservice to call it a contemporary tone-poem.

Mark Berry – The Boulezian (2022)

Songs of Empty Landscapes (2020)

He has worked for long periods in England and is currently on the threshold of an exciting career with commissions from several top international ensembles. Listening to the seven-movement Songs of Empty Landscapes (2020) for saxophone and piano quartet, it’s not hard to see why.

That the source of inspiration is Bruce Percy’s minimalist stripped-down nature photographs, not infrequently with wintry and icy subjects, is also not surprising. In fact, it is no more surprising than the spontaneous association that arises on first contact with Järventausta’s tonally delicate synthesis of modernist expressive means and a neo-narrow aesthetic is Hans Abrahamsen’s cult piece Schnee.

Mats Liljeroos – Hufvudstadsbladet (2022, translated from Swedish)

In similar vein, Joel Järventausta’s Songs of Empty Landscapes (2020) transforms visual ideas into various aural guises, with vivid imagination. Scored for saxophone, violin, viola, cello and piano, and cast in seven short movements, the fifteen-minute piece evokes exquisite sounding pictures, to a riveting effect.

Each of the movements is based on a single musical idea, studied and developed with joyous invention and detailed finesse. Clad in luminous harmonies and textures, astonishingly brought to life by the members of the Uusinta Ensemble, Songs of Empty Landscapes is an adventure into sounding richness, rooted in an admirable economy of the source material.

While some of the movements are slowly transforming, almost static, others demonstrate tangible, kinetic energy. Out of the ensemble’s fabric, solo lines emerge, providing the songs refferred in the piece’s title. Based on the wonderful world premiere, one would assume that these songs will be heard many, many times in the future.

Jari Kallio – Adventures in Music (2020)

Ripped Tapestry (2019)

Convincing contemporary music! …Making a name for himself in the world, Joel Järventausta is an interesting composer, whose modernistic approach is disciplined and technically impressive, but also exudes a softer, non-theoretical or non-formulaeic spirit. The author found Ripped Tapestry to be the highlight of the evening, and what more Ruut Kiiski made it especially lively and multi-dimensional.

Jari Hoffrén – Jälkikaikuja korvakäytäviltä (2021, translated from Finnish)