Einojuhami Rautavaara

Biography

Rautavaara was born in Helsinki in 1928 and studied with Merikanto at the Helsinki Academy (1948-52), with Persichetti at the Juilliard School in New York (1955-56), and with Sessions and Copland at Tanglewood (1955). He first came to international attention in 1955 when the neo-classical A Requiem in Our Time for brass and percussion won the Thor Johnson Composer’s Competition in Cincinnati. He studied serialism and soon integrated twelve note techniques, without displacing his essential Romanticism. For instance, Symphony No.3 (1961) may be the first totally serial Finnish work, yet it is also a tribute to the symphonies of Bruckner, complete with Wagner tubas.

In the late 1960s Rautavaara distanced himself from serialism and his mystical character came more to the fore in music of rich colour and sweeping melodic profile, at once accessible and evocative. His operas have often explored issues of creativity and madness, such as Vincent (1986-87), Aleksis Kivi (1995-96) and Rasputin (2001-03), and his symphonies and concerti have increasingly been commissioned by orchestras outside his native Finland, including Symphony No.8 ‘The Journey’ (1999) for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a Harp Concerto (1999-2000) for the Minnesota Orchestra and a Clarinet Concerto (2001-02) for Richard Stoltzman and the National Symphony in Washington.

Recent works by Rautavaara include the orchestral work Tapestry of Life (2007), the concertos Incantations for percussionist Colin Currie (2008) and Towards the Horizon for cellist Truls Mork (2008-09), and Summer Thoughts (2008) toured by violinist Midori. His new Missa a cappella (2010-11) has performances scheduled in the Netherlands, Australia, the UK and Sweden.

Rautavaara's music has been recorded on the Ondine, Finlandia and Naxos labels and DVDs have been released of his operas The Gift of the Magi, Alexis Kivi and Rasputin.

Einojuhani Rautavaara - Concerto for piano & orchestra-1, Op 45- Movement 1

Piano Concerto No,1 (1969)

My First Piano Concerto was a very personal composition: it was written for my own idiosyncratic piano technique, and in fact I have performed it myself with many orchestras. I was disappointed at that time with the strict academic structuring of serialist music and the ascetic mainstream style of piano music, which I found anaemic. In the concerto, therefore, I returned to the aesthetics of expressiveness and a sonorous, ‘grand-style’ keyboard technique. One could say that this was a post-modernist work created before anyone had even invented the term. The concerto opens with unabashed palm clusters, these, however, are underpinned by arpeggios and the overall effect is replete with unbridled  singing pathos. From the beginning of the second movement to the end of the work there is a continuous escalation. The slow movement expands, coalesces and accelerates until a dissonant and dramatic cadenza leads into the unrestrained dance of the concluding movement in 3+2+3 time, a rhythm that can also be found in several of my other works.

Einojuhami Rautavaara

Note from CD

Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the most colourful and diverse figures in Finnish music. He is an artist of exceptionally broad scope, at once Romantic and intellectual, mysticist and constructivist. He has gone through a great many stages in his stylistic development, yet he has combined different stylistic elements in post-modernist fashion within individual works. Rautavaara began his career under the influence of post-war Neo-Classicism; in the 1950s, he began to apply twelve-tone procedures and progressed in some works to quite a modernist idiom. On the other hand, even works written close to each other in time could differ widely in their approach; for instance, in his Third Symphony, written in the middle of his twelve-tone period, he gave free rein to the luscious romantic emotion that came to dominate his music from the late 1960s onwards. Since the late 1970s, he has been creating a synthesis of various stylistic influences. Rautavaara’ s extensive and versatile output contains several operas, seven symphonies, other orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, piano music and vocal music. Rautavaara has been a major Finnish composer since the 1950s, and has been steadily gaining in international esteem, especially in the 1990s.

Orchestral music is an important genre in Rautavaara’s work. The symphonies from its core, spanning his career and illustrating his stylistic development. He should note, though, that Rautavaara’ s symphonic cycle did not take on its present form until the 1980s, when the composer revised the first two symphonies and replaced the original Fourth Symphony with Arabescata (1962). From the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular, Rautavaara’s orchestral music has been characterized by an opulent sonority and grand romantic gestures. His expressive palette extends from lyrical soaring melodies to incisive rhythms and massive cascades of sound. The various solo concertos combine these features with a soloistic and instrumental dimension. Rautavaara has remarked that his concertos are “a drama, a conflict between the individual and the collective”.

Kimmo Korhonen 

Einojuhani Rautavaara - Symphony No. 3, Op 20- Movement 4

Biography and Discography HERE

Einojuhani Rautavaara's Albums HERE

Piano Concerto No1(Amazon.com) HERE