Paula Robison & Paavali Jumppanen - Caprice (2016)

Our collection is called “Caprice” in honor of Thierry Lancino’s Cinq Caprices, adapted for flute and piano especially for this recording. The collection is an homage to Pierre Boulez and his life-changing, challenging, ironic, and capricious "Sonatine pour flute et piano", written in 1946. Both Paavali Jumppanen and I had the great good luck to work with Pierre Boulez in our formative years, so when we started to perform together it was obvious that the Sonatine would be a central part of our repertoire and that a recording would follow. We are very happy that all our work and dreams have finally come to fruition. For this album we thought it would be a charming thing to circle the Sonatine with music which deeply influenced Boulez and which he treasured (Claude Debussy), music by his teacher and colleague (Olivier Messiaen), and music by his own student and colleague in Paris who participated in the seminal years of IRCAM and who has kept its legacy while going on to find his own style and voice and fly with it (Thierry Lancino). So it became a Caprice in another sense: a sort of a dancing, encircling tribute. The Debussy song transcriptions are mine, the "Prélude à l'après midi d'un faune" Paavali and I did together using the orchestral score and the Ravel transcription for piano, and the song translations are mine; the poetry is so great that we wanted to include all of it in the album notes. We hope you enjoy this wonderful music!