I thought I’d do something completely different tonight. Teemu Halmkrona is a classically trained Finnish musician and composer who works at a music school and as a ‘freelance musician’.
He writes impressionistic and neo-romantic piano pieces and attempts to evoke what he calls “nostalgic emotions”. That was his task on the EP ‘Seasonal Moods’ for which he plays short classical and neoclassical works on a grand piano.
Each piece has its own mood and story to tell but I’m focused here on the final track (of five), ‘Waiting for snow’.
As regular readers know I have my own abstract reasons for settling on one particular track from an EP or album and in this instance it is because the weather in the UK has been so lousy in July that even on the first day of August, in what Mr Gutteres has taken to calling ‘Global Boiling’, it’s been sufficiently cold to drag up buried memories of winter.
So my personal task is to discover whether he can invoke not so nostalgic emotions equally.
And he can. Another thing regular readers (I hope there still are some) will know is that wherever there is a cinematic quality to a piece of music (and that is the case right across ‘Seasonal Moods’)I set myself the challenge of identifying a movie scene that a particular track would fit perfectly even if there is already such a piece in place (which there usually is).
Here, it was a no-brainer. If you’ve seen ‘Catch me if you can’, the biopic of the American super con-man Frank Abagnale Jr, played by Leoanrdo DiCaprio, you’ll remember the tear-jerking scene towards the end where Frank, having been captured in France and brought back to the US on a flight during which he learns his father his died, escapes off the aircraft as it lands by unscrewing a toilet and makes his way to his mother’s house.
There, with the cops closing in on him he watches his mother and her small daughter from another relationship through a window, dejectedly waving at the child as the long arm of the law feels his collar.
Throughout the scene the snow is falling incessantly.
I can’t recall the music (by John Williams) that is used in that scene and there is no video I can find to help.
But I can say without doubt that if it was substituted by ‘Waiting for snow’ it would make for an ideal match.
I can’t give a better endorsement than that.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teemu.halmkrona
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teemu_halmkrona_composer/
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