This marvelous disc contains what unquestionably is the finest available performance of Cantus Arcticus, Rautavaara's most popular piece and one of the very best marriages of an orchestra and taped sounds. For this recording, the birdsong tape seems to have been cleaned up, giving the timbres additional clarity and purity, and the balance between orchestra and electronics is perfectly judged. The result is simply gorgeous. I was also struck very strongly by the harmonic resemblance between the finale and the opening movement of Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Listen for yourself and see if you don't agree!

Garden of Spaces is a sort of sonic sculpture, fully notated but permitting various sections of the orchestra to time their entrances differently at each performance. Rautavaara has created thematic material, unlike so many such pieces, that seemingly makes sense given these parameters, and so the music comes across as coherent, shapely, and quite haunting.

But the outstanding work here is the new Clarinet Concerto for Richard Stoltzman. Rautavaara seems to have a special feeling for the instrument. In the score of his opera Aleksis Kivi, the composer restricts the woodwind contingent to two clarinets, used to magical effect, and this concerto certainly ranks among the most successful in the modern repertoire. While full of virtuosity and some incredibly difficult-sounding writing in the clarinet's highest register, the most memorable moments occur where Rautavaara exploits the instrument's unparalleled ability to sing in tones of liquid lyricism. The central slow movement in particular must rank as one of the most purely beautiful in Rautavaara's (or anyone else's) entire output.

It goes almost without saying that as the dedicatee Stoltzman plays with total commitment, and as usual in this series the contributions of Leif Segerstam and the Helsinki Philharmonic are ideal. Excellent sonics, warm and well-balanced (in the concerto) round out another magnificent contribution to the Rautavaara discography.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

CORELLI, VIVALDI, ETC: MUSIC F

Villa-Lobos, H.: Introduction To Choros / Guitar Concerto /

Ondine here presents a recording of chamber music by Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023). Known for her colourful orchestration, Saariaho’s impressive variety of sound is apparent in all of the works included here.

The trios are composed for different combinations of instruments, each of them demonstrating their individual colours.

Ondine has previously released the orchestral version of Mirage, and here presents the world première recording of the trio version. Musicians on this recording have performed Saariaho’s work for a number of years and display a striking affinity with her music.

The release also celebrated Kaija Saariaho’s 60th birthday (14th October 2012).

As a great fan of Jessye Norman's first recording of Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs, I can say without impugnity that this brand new version is as fine, and can be seen as the anti-Norman at the same time. Where Norman lingers (and lingers, and lingers), pouring out buckets of lavish, dark tone and dizzying us with the finality of both the vision and the composer's biography, Soile Isokoski, with her infinitely brighter tone is accepting and loving, and her final song is the epitome of simple peace. Indeed, the four-song cycle clearly aims in that direction, but it is more often chock-filled with a sentimentality that, while not entirely unwelcome, in essence is unnecessary given the lushness of the music. Isokoski's reserve is almost religious in the purest sense of the word--there's faith written all over the four steps of the four songs. And needless to say, she has the technique to carry Strauss' long lines upward and back downward with ease, and her sound is beautiful.

The other 11 songs on the CD are similarly well thought through and performed. Most of the tempos she and Marek Janowski opt for are quick, and the decisions are wise and all of a piece: Even in the endlessly recorded Zueignung, the final "Habe dank!" is not deep and heavy--it's glorious. The Three Kings song comes across as a simple, lovely tale, told with clarity and directness; the Wiegenlied is a lullaby of gratefulness. Three Brentano songs, all filled with nature and flowers, are handsomely put forward, with the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin's accompaniments clear and clean, woodwinds ideally played, and Ondine's engineers capturing every nuance in Strauss' orchestration without unnaturally underlining any one of them. I can't praise this beautiful release enough. Despite the many wonderful versions of the Four Last Songs (and many of the others) by singers as diverse and great as Norman, Schwarzkopf, and Janowitz, no lover of Strauss' songs or of great, elegant, un-prima-donna-ish singing should be without Isokoski's. [3/24/2002]

--Robert Levine, ClassicsToday.com

TANSSIINKUTSU FINNISH NATIONA

BRAHMS: PIANO QUARTETS IN G &

Includes aria(s) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Jules Massenet. Ensemble: Latvian National Symphony. Conductor: Alexander Vilumanis. Soloist: Elina Garanca.

The carefully chosen Latin fragments from ancient Pompeii graffiti inscriptions form a fresco of the society of 2000 years ago and of today; since ancient times, graffiti has been used as a tool for free expression of social or political criticism. GRAFFITI also contains references to Igor Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, as well as to the music of Bartók and Puccini. However, GRAFFITI carries the individual sound of Magnus Lindberg, who has always been recognized as a great master of the orchestral sound, and who now has proves to be a master of choral music.

This selection received the 1999 Cannes Classical Award for "Best Orchestral Recording - CD Premiere."

This album presents a sequel for the award-winning album (ICMA Choral disc of the year) of Tchaikovsky’s sacred choral works by the Latvian Radio Choir and conductor Sigvards Klava. These two albums together form the composer’s complete sacred works for the choir. The All-Night Vigil Op. 52 for mixed choir, also known as the Vesper Service, was written between May 1881 and March 1882. It was first performed by the Chudovsky Chorus conducted by Pyotr Sakharov in Moscow at the concert hall of the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition on 27 June 1882. Tchaikovsky described the work as ‘An essay in harmonization of liturgical chants.’ For this work the composer carefully studied the tradition of musical practice in the Russian Orthodox Church, which could vary considerably from one region to another. This beautiful, yet rarely recorded work is accompanied by four other choral works all written during the same decade: Hymn in Honour of Saints Cyril and Methodius as part of commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius, A Legend, originally coming from the collection Sixteen Songs for Children, Jurists’ Song, for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, and The Angel Cried Out, a beautiful traditional Russian Orthodox Easter hymn and Tchaikovsky’s final choral work.

Avant-garde origins never quite let go. Brilliance, fantastic, imaginative orchestra textures all add to the draw of this music.

Make no mistake, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg is a cutting-edge modernist nor has his blade been stropped smooth. It's severing is achieved through ragged saw-teeth and violent conflict.

He attended classes given by Paavo Heininen at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy. Later he studied in Darmstadt with Ferneyhough and Lachenmann and with Donatoni at Siena and Grisey in Paris.

The works featured here have been riffled and reshuffled to present them broken from original couplings and sequenced early to late: 1982 to 2005.

Tendenza gives no quarter. Its upheaval and collisions are utterly committed. The shock-waves radiate outwards. Dissonance is the norm as is fragmentation and belligerence. Kraft is as obsidian-hard as Tendenza. It somehow embodies preferences for things that are fast and complicated. Its first of two segments ends in slowly turning scintillation. The second section quivers, squeaks and moans though ultimately rises to growling sharply accentuated aggression and a shriek of volleyed violence. Kinetics, written after a debilitating tropical illness forced silence on him for 18 months is more pointilliste than Kraft and Tendenza. Parts of it are redolent of Stravinsky's Petrushka though the music also lashes out with a vengeful goad and in viscous dissonance .

Marea starts with violent upheaval and nightmare bass-accented attack. As with Tendenza Avanti! sounds every bit the full orchestra - not scaled down at all. On the other hand, as the movement progresses, there are more foot and hand holds for the less ‘advanced’ listener and the accelerating rush speaks directly if with more wildness than we may be used to. A sprinting piano adds decorative pearlescent streamers and there is some degree of repetition to acclimatise the ears and mind. In this sense the music is a little closer to Silvestrov symphonies 4 and 5.

Joy is the third panel of the trilogy of Kinetics, Marea and Joy. It is dissonant yet has a softer impact but is just as complex in texture - with pianos, electronics and vividly recorded percussion.

Corrente for chamber orchestra shivers with eldritch life and references Stravinsky time and again but filtered through Darmstadt's disaffected alembic. Tragedy tolls out at the end. Corente II is a rewrite of Corrente for full orchestra and is allowed much more space. There are some lyric insurgencies and plenty of generously rhythmic interest.

Coyote Blues is another chamber orchestra piece. This incorporates ululating material redolent of 1960s Hovhaness and Penderecki with baleful trombones and rolling and roiling waves of sound. A Petrushka-like delight is suddenly shaken free at 10:09.

Arena has an abundance of fine lines often seething in activity and rising to a high glowing voltage of shining writing for violins. This is closed off by a steady humming diminuendo.

Arena II is the original written but large rather like the Corrente pair but by no means as effective in its dénouement.

Feria is jewelled with little fanfare figures allocated to brass and woodwind as individuals.

Gran duo strips out the strings and percussion leaving us in a tension net between brass and woodwind. There are no lead soloists - not a concerto except that all these Lindberg works sound like Concertos for Orchestra. His title Concerto for Orchestra comes after Chorale - the shortest piece here and one written expressly as a companion to the Berg Violin Concerto. It makes frank play with Bach's Es ist genug. The Concerto for Orchestra is a single movement piece of about half an hour duration. Its demeanour and fantastically mercurial nature brought home to me that all his orchestral pieces are display effusions, Darmstadt or otherwise.

The final and most recent work is Sculpture. Violins are elided. Instead we hear an orchestra of quadruple woodwind, two thrumming pianos, two harps, organ, two Wagner tubas and full brass complement. Again this is a spectacular written to complement the vast space of the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. A touch of ancient Rome aside, this is very much another virtuoso race-course as well as reminiscent of Penderecki and Sibelius at his most the most enigmatic and his most heroic and most catastrophic. It operates as a sort of dissonant Pohjola's Daughter. This is a vast lapidary gauze in motion cut across with gritty rhythmic attack as at 18:11. Parts of this look towards the grand tone poems of David Mathews. The sunburst at 1830 onwards is redolent of the sunrise in Night-Ride and Sunrise complete with an extravagantly chattering organ. It’s a mite garrulous but full of delights in the manner of Silvestrov's psychedelia. It ends on an almost Baxian glow; so very different from the Tendenza of two decades before.

There’s a good English and Finnish booklet by Kimmi Korhonen which tells you what you want to know at about the right pace and length. Avant-garde origins never quite let go - why should they - but brilliance, fantastic imaginative orchestra textures and Stravinskian mulch all add to the draw of this music.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

Recently Composer-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic, Magnus Lindberg has created works that deeply impress listeners. Acclaimed violinist Pekka Kuusisto performs the Violin Concerto as the composer conducts.

Ondine’s devotion to the music of Einojuhani Rautavaara has been of considerable standing and of great depth. Here we have a disc of highlights of pieces from their catalogue. The only complete works are Cantus arcticus and Apotheosis, though admirers of the composer will know that whilst this last named is a separate work, and one that can be performed in isolation with minor adaptations, it also forms part of the Sixth Symphony.

I’m sure that this neatly selected series of works will whet the appetite of those yet to experience Rautavaara’s music. I think it’s right that if you’re going to present a compact work by him in toto it should be Cantus arcticus, which is one of his most popular. This Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, a beautiful title if ever there was one, evinces all his most personal and vital qualities - string wash of great, indeed magnetic, power and concentration, the quality of melancholy so often encountered in his music, and an accumulation of sound that reaches, at moments, almost a frenzy. For all his reflective qualities he has never been a dormant composer; rather he has managed to unleash moments of great power and energy that seem to have aggregated from the earlier material. Such, certainly, is the trajectory of this work, never for a moment gimmicky, always beautiful and, fortunately, the electronic song is expertly balanced in this recording.

The other works offer interesting perspectives too. The second movement of the Clarinet Concerto is played by the dedicatee Richard Stoltzman, who worked closely with the composer during its composition. Its lyric outpouring is as addictive as the third movement of Autumn Gardens, a nature portrait of powerful verdancy. The first part of Manhattan Trilogy is called Daydreams and its alternation of percussive power and refined lyricism is effectively realised, whereas the third movement of the Third Piano Concerto, called Gift of Dreams, is restless, passionate, bright edged and enshrines some truly portentous moments. Vladimir Ashkenazy plays and directs. The final two pieces are from symphonic works; Apotheosis is rapt and beautiful, whilst the segment from the Sixth Symphony is calm, dreamlike, reflective.

The majority of performances are by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under Leif Segerstam. All the performances are special and I hope they will lead appreciative and curious readers to the relevant Ondine box sets that house the symphonies and concertos.

– Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

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