The Essential Rautavaara: A CD Roundup

One of the more anticipated commissions to appear this season as part of Juilliard's centennial is Manhattan Trilogy by Einojuhani Rautavaara, which the Juilliard Orchestra premieres under Dennis Russell Davies at its Centennial Day concert on October 11 at Carnegie Hall (see article on Page 1). Rautavaara, who turns 77 this month, is one of today's most important living composers and a father figure to Finland's rich contemporary music scene. He is so closely identified with Finnish symphonic tradition, in fact, that it is easy to forget that he spent some of his formative years studying at Juilliard.

As the story goes, for his 90th birthday in 1955, Sibelius was offered the chance to award a Koussevitzky Foundation grant to a promising young composer, and he chose Rautavaara on the strength of his award-winning Requiem in Our Time. The grant enabled him to study at Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti, which later brought him to Tanglewood where he studied with Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland. He later returned to Finland and seldom made it back to New York. But in the past decade or so, his music has found a wider international audience, mostly through an ongoing series of recordings.

Earlier this year came the latest CD from Finland's Ondine label (ODE 1041-2), featuring among other works, his Cantus Arcticus, often referred to as a "Concerto for Birds and Orchestra." The piece includes an array of taped bird songs, recorded in Finland and around the Arctic Circle, and superimposed over a luminous, flowing orchestral texture. While its three movements are primarily serene and lyrical in character, the third movement is more chaotic, with a flurry of swans migrating against clouds of string tremolos and bird imitations in the woodwinds. Leif Segerstam and the Helsinki Philharmonic give a committed performance and avoid treating the work as a mere novelty. The CD also features the 2000 Clarinet Concerto, a lush, rhapsodic work performed by Richard Stoltzman, and the 1971 Garden of Spaces, an example of early '70s modernism.

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Rautavaara is primarily a composer of orchestral music, and another must-have recording is the 1994 Symphony No. 7, Angel of Light (Ondine ODE 869). This work—a meditative four-movement canvas with a broadly appealing language—almost single-handedly established his international reputation. Despite its new-agey title (Rautavaara wrote several pieces dealing with angels), Angel of Light is not programmatic and contains many earmarks of a 19th-century symphony, including a turbulent second movement that features dissonant eruptions of brass and apocalyptic climaxes. To get a sense of this work's musical language, imagine crossing Sibelius with Shostakovich and add a helping of Arvo Part.

If you're still raring for more Rautavaara, another Ondine CD (ODE 881) featuring the tone poems Angels and Visitations and Isle of Bliss along with the Violin Concerto (with Elmar Oliveira) comes highly recommended. And for a sampling of the composer's earlier, modernist style, The Essential Rautavaara (Ondine ODE 989) is an excellent primer featuring the 1952 piano suite The Fiddlers and the 1953 brass work A Requiem in Our Time, alongside several more recent works.

Brian Wise is a producer at WNYC radio and writes about music for The New York Times, Time Out New York, Opera News, and other publications.