"...In last night’s all-nordic programme of Sibelius and Martinsson, it was clear that Rouvali is totally at home in this repertoire: his choices of tempi and dynamic phrasing were faultless and broadcast with energy and detail.

Rolf Martinsson’s trumpet concerto Bridge is a phenomenal piece of music and Håkan Hardenberger, for whom it was written in 1999, is a phenomenal trumpeter. The work is so technically demanding and so interwoven with Hardenberger’s personality that hardly anyone else has dared to attempt it. Two things struck me: the first was how similar Hardenberger sounds to some of the great bepop jazz trumpeters, playing cadenzas without the syncopation but with the same fluidity in extracting the shape of a melody from a rapid cascade of notes. The second was the extraordinary level of control that Hardenberger achieves when playing quietly. To watch him play those quicksilver runs of notes, at a mere fraction above the breath level where the instrument stops making a sound at all, was an awesome experience. Bridge is a work full of contrasts, and like Lemminkäinen’s Return, it can be very cinematic. It saw Rouvali and the orchestra on safer ground, both in the quiet, sparse textures early in the work and then in the gigantic orchestral climaxes that ensue..."