Flounce

Program notes

About the Work

‘Flounce’ is a concert opener of about five minutes, and it was written for one of the most watched concerts in the calendar. BBC Radio 3 commissioned it for the Last Night of the Proms, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo gave the first performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 9 September 2017. Lotta Wennäkoski wrote it in the spring of that year, and she has said that knowing who would play it first, and where, was a great source of inspiration.

In her own note on the piece she explains that this time the title came first and steered the music. She was taken with the different meanings of the English word ‘flounce’, as a verb and as a noun: the abrupt, impatient movement of someone flouncing out of a room, and the gathered strip of fabric that trims a skirt or a sleeve. The piece has both. Much of it, she writes, is made of brisk gestures that are ‘non troppo serioso’, not too serious, and these alternate with passages of lace-like ornament in a lighter, more lyrical mood.

Few Proms commissions have a long life after their first night, and this one has. Her publisher, Fennica Gehrman, describes it as a curtain-raiser that became an international hit, and Music Finland counted fourteen performances around the world within two years of the premiere. That same spring it was on the programme of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki when their tour brought them to this hall. Wennäkoski is no stranger to Amsterdam: according to Music Finland the Concertgebouw Orchestra programmed the Dutch premiere of her flute concerto ‘Soie’ in March 2019. For these concerts the orchestra places ‘Flounce’ at the head of a Finnish first half, before the new work by Magnus Lindberg.

What to Listen For

Wennäkoski describes a double character in the writing as well as in the title. On one side there is an energetic pulse that keeps the music moving forward; on the other there are timbres that she calls sometimes non-conventional, and a feeling of space in the orchestration. So listen for the way the sound is laid out as much as for any tune. The quick, slightly comic gestures tend to arrive suddenly and break off just as suddenly, while the ornamental passages are finer-grained and seem to hang in the air. The orchestra’s own description of the piece speaks of light, clarity and movement, as if the composer wanted to escape the pull of gravity. Five minutes is not long, and the piece does not waste any of them.