Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928) Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the most colourful and diverse figures in Finnish music. He is an artist of exceptionally...
Einojuhani Rautavaara
(b. 1928)
Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the most colourful and diverse figures
in Finnish music. He is an artist of exceptionally broad scope, at once
Romantic and intellectual, mysticist and constructivist. He has gone through a
great many stages in his stylistic development, yet he has combined different
stylistic elements in post-modernist fashion within individual works.
Rautavaara began his career under the influence of post-war Neo-Classicism; in
the 1950s, he began to apply twelve-tone procedures and progressed in some
works to quite a modernist idiom. On the other hand, even works written close
to each other in time could differ widely in their approach; for instance, in
his Third Symphony, written in the middle of his twelve-tone period, he
gave free rein to the luscious romantic emotion that came to dominate his music
from the late onwards. Since the late 1970s, he has been creating a synthesis
of various stylistic influences. Rautavaara's extensive and versatile output contains
several operas, seven symphonies, other orchestral works, concertos, chamber
music, piano music and vocal music. Rautavaara has been a major Finnish
composer since the 1950s, and has been steadily gaining in international
esteem, especially in the 1990s.
Orchestral music is an important genre in Rautavaara's work. The
symphonies form its core, spanning his career and illustrating his stylistic
development. We should note, though, that Rautavaara's symphonic cycle did not
take on its present form until the 1980s, when the composer revised the first
two symphonies and replaced the original Fourth Symphony with Arabescata
(1962). From the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular, Rautavaara's
orchestral music has been characterized by an opulent sonority and grand
romantic gestures. His expressive palette extends from lyrical soaring melodies
to incisive rhythms and massive cascades of sound. The various solo concertos
combine these features with a soloistic and instrumental dimension. Rautavaara
has remarked that his concertos are "a drama, a conflict between the
individual and the collective".
Kimmo Korhonen
Cantus Arcticus, Concerto for birds and orchestra (1972)
The Cantus Arcticus was commissioned by the 'Arctic' University
of Oulu for its degree ceremony. Instead of the conventional festive cantata
for choir and orchestra, I wrote a 'concerto for birds and orchestra'. The bird
sounds were taped in the Arctic Circle and the marshlands of Liminka. The first
movement, Suo ('The Marsh'), opens with two solo flutes. They are
gradually joined by other wind instruments and the sounds of bog birds in
spring. Finally, the strings enter with abroad melody that might be interpreted as the voice
and mood of a person walking in the wilds. In Melankolia, the featured
bird is the shore lark; its twitter has been brought down by two octaves to
make it a 'ghost bird'. Joutsenet muuttavat ('Swans migrating') is an
aleatory texture with four independent instrumental groups. The texture
constantly increases in complexity, and the sounds of the migrating swans are
multiplied too, until finally the sound is lost in the distance.
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1969)
My First Piano Concerto was a very personal composition: it was
written for my own idiosyncratic piano technique, and in fact I have performed
it myself with many orchestras. I was disappointed at that time with the strict
academic structuring of serialist music and the ascetic mainstream style of
piano music, which I found anaemic. In the concerto, therefore, I returned to
the aesthetics of expressiveness and a sonorous, 'grand-style' keyboard
technique. One could say that this was a post-modernist work created before
anyone had even invented the term. The concerto opens with unabashed palm
clusters, which in the recapitulation become forearm clusters, these, however,
are underpinned by arpeggios and the overall effect is replete with unbridled
singing pathos. From the beginning of the second movement to the end of the
work there is a continuous escalation. The slow movement expands, coalesces and
accelerates until a dissonant and dramatic cadenza leads into the unrestrained
dance of the concluding movement in 3+2+3 time, a rhythm that can also be found
in several of my other works.
Symphony No. 3 (1959-60)
In my cycle of symphonies, the Third is a sort of synthesis of
the romanticism of the First and the modernism of the Second. The
listener will not necessarily be aware that the music is in fact dodecaphonic,
since the technique is not used here to generate full chromaticism or
atonality. The twelve tones of the tempered chromatic scale are merely the
'vocabulary' of twentieth century music, and the 'syntax' one uses to construct
the actual music is the main question. The intervals of the Third Symphony are
derived from a twelve-tone row. The music, however, is freely constructed and
emphatically tonal. The musical pulse of the fourth movement progresses in
solemn, almost Brucknerian arcs, as if echoing the rhythm of the earth and sea.
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Hannu Lintu
Hannu Lintu was born in Finland 1967. He studied piano and cello first
at the Conservatory in Turku and later at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. He
began his conducting studies with Atso Almila, later working with Jorma Panula,
Ilja Musin and Eri Klas, as well as participating in the master classes of
Myung Whun Chung in Siena. In 1994 he won the Nordic Conductors Competition in
Bergen and has since conducted the Bergen and Helsinki Philharmonic orchestras
and the symphony orchestras of Stavanger, Trondheim, Finnish Radio and Swedish
Radio. In the autumn of 1995 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Bergen
Collegium Musicum, and in 1998 he assumed the same rôle with the Turku
Philharmonic Orchestra.