This new album by the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and Aapo Häkkinen together with the Audi Jugendchorakademie and bassoonist Jani Sunnarborg featuring late works by composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell (1775–1838) makes an important addition to the recordings of Nordic Classical period works and of early Finnish music. Highlight of the album is the world-première recording of Crusell’s Viking-themed The Last Warrior (Den sista kämpen), the composer’s last large-scale composition.

Conductor Robert Kajanus described in 1896 that Crusell was “among the classics in Finnish art music”. Born in Finland in 1775, Crusell was a child prodigy who was sent to Stockholm to receive musical training in his late teens. Crusell would become a famous clarinet virtuoso who toured Berlin, Leipzig and Paris, staying there for six months in 1803, and who would write three virtuosic clarinet concertos which still today belong to the standard repertoire of the instrument alongside Mozart’s famous Clarinet Concerto.