Willows
Beauty in the Soil of Grief
For those in the Birmingham area, there are only a few tickets left for Saturday’s concert with The Arcadian Wild and The Corner Room. You can get tickets HERE and we look forward to seeing you there!
Arist: Pekka Kuusisto, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Sam Amidon
Album: Willows
Release Date: February 20, 2026
Notes:
Pekka Kuusisto is a Finnish violinist and performer whose accolades are many and whose experience runs deep. He’s no stuffy instrumentalist, but is known for moments of improvisation, creative disruption, and the sort of boundary-pushing that looks like freedom and play. He’s one of those artists who seems to treat everything as material for beauty in-time. He’s always artistic and occasionally unpredictable.
The Willows is his latest release, arriving in the wake of profound personal loss: the deaths of both of his parents and his brother.
Kuusisto has said of the record:
“The Willows album, to me, is an embrace, a comfortable silence and a knowing look between friends… A large part of the process of making the album revolved around grief, both personal and global, as recent times have not displayed the best of humanity. I don’t subscribe to the adage ‘to create art, one must suffer.’ However, using the undeniable weight of sorrow to try to put some beauty into the world seems like a worthy endeavour.”
The album begins with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, and Kuusisto brings his own creative sensibilities to the table by disrupting typical performance expectations of the piece. It is one of the more beautiful moments of music I’ve heard in 2026. Lark anchors the entire record in a sense of loss, yet with hope. It’s sorrow, but with a sunrise looming as the birds begin to sing.
From there we move into Caroline Shaw’s Plan & Elevation, which does not slow the glory, though its tonal palette shifts. Shaw wrote the work to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, choosing to reflect on the architectural plans of the home and gardens.
She explains:
“The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or ‘bird’s-eye,’ perspective (‘plan’), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (‘elevation’). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavor — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan.”
Kuusisto and the orchestra perform this masterfully. The pizzicato in The Ellipse is clear as crystal, providing a near-frightening moment of tension. The instruments then align in steady crescendos that chill the bone to end the piece.
The Cutting Garden continues the forward motion.
The Herbaceous Border slows things down, with strings providing a near-drone effect that settles over the listener.
The Beech Tree is transporting, placing me in a garden of contemplation filled with glory, weight, and grief.
Ellen Reid’s Desiderium sounds like a tangled web of panic met with the quiet of lived pain and loss. It carries both agitation and restraint, painting pain in the soul as both a lightning storm and a whisper.
The album shifts again with a lovely suite of six folk songs from Sam Amidon.
Amidon performs his tunes vocally, with new orchestral arrangements for them provided by Nico Muhly. These songs move the album from orchestral heights (violin beauty suspended in the heavens and grave), back down to the home and prairie. They carry a pastoral sensibility that comforts the listener.
Life is moving again.
There is soil in the cracks of our hands. Blood too.
There is joy, faint but real, on the horizon.
The Willows is not an album that wallows in grief without hope, nor does not sentimentalize sorrow. It musically acknowledges the weight of grief honestly and then asks what beauty might still be made from it. Kuusisto does not force resolution. Instead, he offers contemplation, and an embrace, in his music.
For Parents:
Clean
Listen:
Apple Music | Spotify
