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CD Reviews By Martin Anderson Always his own man
It's rather odd, these days, thinking back to the days in the 1960s and '70s when the musical world was riven by the competing claims of tonal and atonal music: in our own polystylist times we simply accept music as good or bad, regardless of the manner of its expression. That's as it should be, of course, but we shouldn't forget the kind of pressure that composers were under to keep abreast of the times - that is, write serial music. So the gradually rejection of twelve-note writing chronicled in Joonas Kokkonen's three string quartets - No. 1 was written in 1958-59, No. 2 in 1964-66 and No. 3 in 1976 - required the composer, so it seemed, to swim against the tide in search of his true voice. But with the benefit of hindsight (or hindhearing, if you prefer) we can see that despite the orthodox twelve-note writing of the First Quartet Kokkonen is present in every bar, and that what happens over the coming works is a consolidation of the voice already present then: the lyrical writing pushes to the fore, the dance-elements become more prominent, as does triadic harmony; the Third Quartet also displays Kokkonen's fondness for the hymn-like passages that were to find such ardent expression in his opera The Last Temptations. The Arkadia Quartet provide readings that, technically, are completely reliable but are a little short on the ecstatic quality that ought to inhabit this music.
Kokkonen Singing his way around the world
As often as not, the name you'll see accredited as translator of the Finnish in CD booklets is that of Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (b. 1963). But Mäntyjärvi is rather more than a professional translator: he is also the composer of a substantial corpus of music, the vast bulk of it for chorus. And he has been slowly insinuating himself in the world's concert programmes, not because insistent publishers have been bending conductors' ears or sudden success in some high-profile competition but because singers like singing him: the music has been its own ambassador. The work that seems to be doing the international diplomacy is Mäntyjärvi's Four Shakespeare Songs of 1984, one of his earliest surviving works (he withdrew several earlier scores), and as soon as one encounters its opening number, 'Come Away, Death', one understands why: it has that rare capacity in a piece of music of making you think you must always have known it. The Norwegian Soloists' Choir offer only 'Come Away, Death' in a programme of Shakespeare settings by other Nordic composers (the honourable exception being Frank Martin); the Phoenix Bach Choir also present Nils Lindberg's version of Sonnet XVIII, 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day', and the Martin Songs of Ariel but otherwise offer a more international programme in the company of American and British composers, the selection from the several books of Shakespeare Songs of the New York-based Matthew Harris (b. 1956) matching Mäntyjärvi's in catchy memorability. Both discs are beautifully sung.
Mäntyjärvi Four Shakespeare Songs, with Shakespeare settings by Matthew Harris, Frank Martin, Steven Sametz, Nils Lindberg, Dominick Argento, Alan Murray and Ralph Vaughan Williams So nearly so wonderful
The evidence of Osmo Vänskä's readings of Beethoven's Third and Eighth Symphonies (BIS-SACD-1516) - and the countless Sibelius recordings before that - was that his Ninth was going to be something special. And so it proves, with bells on: I've rarely heard a Ninth with such blazing intensity. The hallmarks of Vänskä's conducting, we've long since learned, are a meticulous attention to detail - if it's in the score, you'll hear it in the performance - and an often startling rhythmic energy. Vänskä's Achilles' heel is three-quarters of his team of vocal soloists, with Helena Juntunen shrill at the top, Neal Davies wobbly at the bottom and Daniel Norman characterless in between. The choral contribution, from the Minnesota Chorale, is commendably nimble, but Davies' vibrato-heavy 'Nicht diese Töne' seems to mean just that: though Vänskä's musicians and choristers keep up the tension, his soloists (I'm exempting Katarina Karnéus from these charges) consistently let him down. Still, most of this recording is the Ninth of your dreams.
Beethoven Tampere triumphant
Finnish musicians and record companies have been good to their Baltic neighbours ever since the Soviet tanks withdrew and the Balts could decide their own foreign policy. Ondine's recording of the Second Symphony and Violin Concerto by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks won 'Disc of the Year' in the Cannes Classical Awards in 2004. The Second Symphony was performed on that CD by the forces that now return tackle Vasks' Third Symphony (2004-5), joined by Marko Ylönen in the Cello Concerto (1993-94). Vasks has an essentially Manichean view of the world, seeing it as the forum for a cosmic battle between good and evil, a battle which is constantly played out in his music, which is clearly concerned with the grand ideas of life. Interviewing P?teris Vasks at the Presteigne Festival on the English-Welsh borders last year, I asked him about the similarities of some passages in his music to the soundworld of Shostakovich, and he answered disarmingly that the necessity of expressing evil in his works necessarily led him to the same sorts of sound as Shostakovich had produced. Both works here play out that great struggle, and both are in single spans, the Symphony encompassing four movements, the Concerto five. If you are sympathetic to large-scale Shostakovich (in works like the Eighth and Eleventh Symphonies), you will probably enjoy this CD as much as I did, although in the Third Symphony, as in the Second, I wonder whether he doesn't overwork his material just that bit too much. The Tampere Philharmonic, through its arrangement with Ondine, is now providing some of the most important recordings of contemporary and recent music, Finnish and otherwise, that are appearing on the market these days: in the past few years these Vasks discs, Einar Englund, Erkki Salmenhaara, Kaipainen, Melartin, Merikanto and more. I await the next recording with that critical cliché, keen anticipation.
Vasks Detail, delicacy and drive
There's something about pianists who compose which marks them out from those who don't, there's a liberty in their playing which gets them deeper into the music, a refusal to be restrained by the notes on the page in their search for a deeper meaning. In his early teens Olli Mustonen made his mark as a composer as much as a pianist, and lists of works on the website of the Finnish Music Information Centre reveals that he is still busy as a creator: there's a cello sonata from 2006 listed there. His handling of Rachmaninov's barnstorming First Sonata and the contrasting delicacies of Tchaikovsky's suite The Seasons (a movement a month) brings them up as fresh as daisies: the Rachmaninov has a fiery urgency and the Tchaikovsky a buoyant poise which are exhilarating. It's especially the ability to expand and contrast rhythms within a melodic line - to tease out phrases and suddenly to start ahead - without losing the sense of flow and to articulate detail within an onward drive (capacities I've noticed in other composer-pianists, like Ronald Stevenson and Marc-André Hamelin) that give these readings their vigour. RachmaninovPiano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28 Tchaikovsky The Seasons, Op. 37b Olli Mustonen (piano) Ondine ODE 1082-5 (71 minutes) Bach heard afresh
When I first picked up this CD, I thought that here was yet another Bach recital, the sort of run-of-the-mill release you have to expect to deal with as part of a reviewer's life. But a closer look revealed something far from the ordinary: Jan Lehtola has chosen his programme very cleverly from other composers' transcriptions of Bach, three of the six here being by Oskar Merikanto, three of whose Bach transcriptions were published in his lifetime; these three are unpublished. Coupled with Middelschulte's version of Busoni's piano recasting of the D minor Chaconne (which is not BWV. 1081, as Lehtola claims in his booklet essay - that's a choral Credo), Reger's of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue (an astonishing re-hearing of the music) and Widor's realisation of six Bach numbers in a suite called Bach's Memento (more hands-on than the other arrangements, but it ends with a corking realisation of the closing chorus from the St Matthew Passion), they make a CD which is refreshingly different. The organ is that of church of Kuusankoski, in south-eastern Finland; it was erected in 1933, to a design by Aarne Wegelius, who had studied the organ with Merikanto. Lehtola writes that 'I cannot imagine a more fitting instrument for recording the works on this disc' - it certainly rings out with a mixture of clarity and strength.
Bach Chaconne in D minor (from Partita in D minor, BWV. 1004), trans. Middelschulte; Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor, BWV. 897 (from Das Wohltempierte Klavier), trans. Merikanto; Prelude in A minor (from English Suite No. 2, BWV. 807), trans. Merikanto; Prelude in G minor (from English Suite No. 3, BWV. 808), trans. Merikanto; Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV. 903, trans. Reger; Widor Bach's Memento More CD reviews in the printed magazine.
Please note that the texts are protected by the copyright laws. They are free for background use, but when referring to these texts or articles, please mention the author and FMQ magazine.
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