Marko Kupari - Distances (2023)

Jämsä's cantor Marko Kupar's new album contains Nordic organ music and focuses on the early days of Finland's independence. The churches built at that time represent the rugged, rugged late art nouveau or pre-funk, which was called neoclassicism, and the music on the album sounds just like that, which is a good or bad thing, depending on the perspective and the way you listen.

Harald Fryklöf's Symphonic Pieces, Fartein Valen's Prelude and Fugue, and especially Carl Nielsen's Commotio are reduced and sustainably constructed works with as much or as little comprehensible emotion as the sepia-colored stone walls of neoclassical churches. But Kupari plays the songs in a believably bright style, and the organ of Jämsä Church, which represents the ideals of the 1930s, suits the music well. So the music sometimes opened up exactly the fresh, open space that the architects of the time had as their goal. But if my own emotional tuning was shaken for a moment, the music started to feel really boring and meaningless.

The commissioned work on the album, Kai Nieminen's Pre-Inter-Post, is not keen on timbre or texture clips either. The sensibility known from Nieminen's music on the organ is not built on silences and colors, as in guitar and orchestral pieces, but on long, poetic lines and broken surfaces of sound and harmony. Towards the end, the song gathers funk style power.

The repertoire compiled by Marko Kupari could be characterized as ambitious, but at least it is original and coherent. This time, the Pilfink company has also cleverly tuned the cover to the album's music, down to the black-and-white, winter lake landscape and fonts.