RAUTAVAARA: Before the Icons; A Tapestry of Life – Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam – Ondine ODE 1149-2 (Distr. by Naxos) *****:
If I wanted to become a classical music composer and could choose any country to live in, the obvious choice would be Finland. In addition to having the world’s highest literacy rate and a superb education system, the Finns have over 100 music schools with subsidized tuition and a long tradition of amateur music-making in choirs, chamber groups and orchestras. How that happened is a story for another time, but the result is a group of significant contemporary composers – Sallinen, Heininen, Saariaho, Lindberg, and Rautaavara – and a number of orchestras and great conductors – Salonen, Vanska, Sarasate, Franck, Oramo, Segerstam with many more to come. As a consequence, there is no shortage of an audience for contemporary music in Finland.
Einojuhani Rautavaara is the elder statesman of contemporary composers in Finland, now 82 years young. More than most contemporary composers, Rautavaara’s music represents the struggle and balance between modernity and tradition in 20th and 21st century music. His stylistic changes, often abrupt on a time continuum, include works that represent modernism, nationalistic romanticism, neo-classicism, serialism, and mysticism. His 1954 work, A Requiem for Our Time, caught the attention of Sibelius, who nominated him for a fellowship in the United States where he studied with Copland, Sessions and Persichetti. Returning to Finland, he became immersed in a decade of cultural and musical upheaval, as his homeland underwent a rapid period of extreme change from nationalism to European modernism. Rautavaara’s diverse music continues to synthesize a balance between the old and the new, much like the life of his musical public, which is one reason why his music remains so popular in Finland. There are over 100 CDs of his works, mostly on the Finnish label Ondine.
Rautavaara’s music has always contained a strong sense of the visual. At the tender age of eleven, the composer took a boat trip to the Orthodox monastery of Valamo. “Looking from the prow of the boat in the early morning, I was rather bored, seeing only fog. Then the wind blew up, and suddenly I could see the towers, all red and gold and the bells starting to ring…I’d never seen anything like the icons with the saints,” Rautavaara said. This experience, and his six piano miniatures of 1955, Icons, have been the inspiration for Before the Icons (1955/2005). It’s a 25 minute orchestral work divided into ten different portrayals of musical images. The Death of Mother God: powerful but sad; Two Village Saints: frivolous and care free; Black Madonna of Blakvinaya: sinister and dangerous; Baptism of Christ: joyful and sacred, etc. Interspersed among the sections are three Prayers: meditative and lovely. The music is tonal, attractive and numinous.
A Tapestry of Life (2007) was composed after Rautavaara miraculously recovered from a serious illness. It depicts four visions of life. The Stars is “a surrealistic nightly vision where stars keep falling in the garden, until the lawn is full of splinters,” the composer writes. His vision is magically impressionistic. Halcyon Days depicts life’s moments in the bright lights: impetuous and memorable. In Sighs and Tears, lush violin sonorities, similar to Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus (without the bird songs), bemoan sad/beautiful moments. The Last Polonaise is a swirling “solemn dance of finality.”
All of the music on this disc is gorgeously performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and sumptuously recorded. Another significant disc in the Rautavaara discography that will appeal to anyone loving beautiful but new orchestral music.
— Robert Moon
