Juhani Nuorvala, one of today’s most prominent Finnish composers, has been described as an “electroacoustic urban minimalist”. This creator is enthusiastically immersed in microtonality, French spectral music, techno and rock culture, all of which often seamlessly blend into his music, along with a frenetic rhythmic drive.

Nuorvala composed the Prelude and Toccata for solo accordion in 1999, commissioned by Finnish accordionist Mika Väyrynen. “The Prelude is dominated by a texture in which both hands play the same notes, producing a wriggling heterophonic melody. In the Toccata, I used the ‘standard bass’, i.e. chord keys. The mechanical chord shifts they produce may be heard as an allusion to the genre represented in the fleeting quote towards the end of the Toccata from Meet Her at the Love Parade by Da Hool.” – said the composer about the work.

“A dreamy Prelude and a rigorous polyrhythmic party in the Toccata” – that is how the accordion virtuoso Tadas Motiečius, who performs the composition on the Lithuanian National Philharmonic stage, described it.