Enchanted Tree in Botanical Garden

Premiere of the piece Enchanted Tree for wind quintet and accordion. Auriga Wind Quintet & Timo Kinnunen, Oulu Botanical Garden, Finland

Enchanted Tree (2015) for the Flute, Oboe, Clarinet/Bass Clarinet, French Horn and Accordion. The creation of the piece is supported by State Culture Capital Foundation (SCCF).

Like a spider weaves its gossamer thread, I breed a miraculous tree in my sound labyrinths. The tree hides a mysterious realm beneath its roots, perhaps transcendent beings and metamorfozes as well. Music reflects instability, motion and transformation, as if the tree is alive and awakened. After the mysterious and dramatic expression, music tends up to the light and peace.

The premiere will be held in the University of Oulu Botanical Gardens, accordingly there is selected a real tree, whose fate and story is unusual. It is the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) – a genus of coniferous tree in the family Araucariaceae.

Wollemia was only known through fossil records until the Australian species Wollemia nobilis was discovered in 1994 in a temperate rainforest wilderness area of the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales. These trees remained common throughout eastern Australia until around 40 million years ago but then gradually declined in range and abundance.

Less than 100 adult trees are known to exist in the wild. For the botanical gardens the tree has been propagated in a separate program aiming to conserve the species and to reduce the interest of visitors and collectors to disturb the natural growing site.

The pine plantlets have reached also the University of Oulu Botanical Gardens and Botanical Garden of the University of Latvia.