Helsinki Philharmonic
I don’t know how honest used-car dealers or aluminum-siding salesmen are these days, but the old con games are alive and well in classical music. This recent release from the contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara is a textbook example of bait and switch. Everything about the packaging and promotion of this CD is designed to make you think Rautavaara is one of those ultratrendy neomedievalist composers following in the wake of current cult superstar Arvo Part, who composes droning monodies in praise of the austere glories of the Russian Orthodox Church. The cover art is a faux primitive religious icon. The two compositions on the disc, a symphony and an organ concerto, have been given titles resonant with hushed spirituality: Angel of Light and Annunciations. And the program notes, written by the composer himself, are heavy on Jungian religious archetypes and claim that the word “angel” chanted as a mantra will begin to “radiate energy.” Listeners will be forgiven for thinking they’re going to get yet another disc of ethereal monk Muzak, like a transmission from a medieval monastery on Venus.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So what we get in Angel of Light is a symphony that starts out with a nebulous slow movement, marked “tranquilo,” in which bits of disconnected melody drift against rising groundswells of strings. It’s lovely but frazzling, like looking at a fogged-in harbor where ships glide past each other without quite bumping. The mood grows exponentially more tense with the second movement allegro: a furnace blast of constructivist noise, all shrieking brass and tumbling timpani. Then there’s another slow movement, marked “come un sogno”–“like a dream.” Rautavaara, like most composers, has a boring notion of what a dream sounds like; he thinks it means something pleasantly moody. But at least this movement actually is pleasantly moody: a long cascade of string legatos trembling just on the edge of dissonance. However, it’s the pesante movement that follows that really makes the symphony worth listening to: Rautavaara stirs up a hair-raising storm, with exhilaratingly prolonged horn crescendos swarmed by weird swirling masses of flutes and strings, all rising together with imposing grandeur before melting into a delicate finale that’s like a hint of blue sky above a thundercloud.
It’s impressive stuff, made even more effective by Segerstam’s rip-roaring conducting–he’s not the sort of maestro who’ll soften the discord so as not to flutter the more timid members of the subscription audience (in fact, he seems to take a boyish glee in seeing just how much noise he can get an orchestra to make). The only problem with the piece is that it seems to have less to do with the stated theme of annunciations than the symphony had to do with angels.
This same problem comes up again and again in the great religious music of the Romantic movement, from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis to Verdi’s Requiem: the traditional forms of sacred music are imitated with extraordinary fidelity and are sometimes brought to life with deep emotional power–but what’s missing is any sense that the music is pointing to something beyond it. You don’t think of God when you listen to the Missa Solemnis, only of Beethoven; and if the Requiem makes you think of the church, it’s only as a hidebound obstacle in the way of Verdi’s democratic ideal. The only traditions Beethoven or Verdi really had any interest in following were musical: the Missa and the Requiem are intended as soulful and impassioned gestures of respect, not to the doctrine of Christianity but to the past composers who so inscrutably believed in it. The real gods hovering over the sacred music of the Romantics are Palestrina and Monteverdi and Bach.
Rautavaara is also fascinated by the idea of incorporating natural sounds into his music–particularly birdsong. Birdcalls recur throughout Annunciations and in several of his other works: strange trillings and plangencies that recall the sonic wildernesses of his native Finland. But where Messiaen’s bird effects are the result of relentless experiments with getting instruments to mimic the odd melodies of various bird species, Rautavaara has gone a more direct route and incorporated real birds. His best-known piece before Angel of Light, the Cantus Arcticus, blandly billed as “a concerto for birds and orchestra,” uses tapes of birds as a kind of solo melodic line, around which a full orchestra weaves moody accompaniments–from the softly mournful tones of the first movement, “The Bog,” up through the ecstatic finale, “Swans Migrating.” I don’t know if it really amounts to more than a stunt–though it’s impressive that Rautavaara was able to devise accompaniments that sound appropriate, given how little birdsong resembles human music. But what does come through is a feeling of depth and mystery; it’s as though we’re getting a little glimpse into a nonhuman world.
