On ClassicsToday: Appreciating Einojuhani Rautavaara–Cello & Piano

Appreciating Einojuhani Rautavaara–Cello & Piano

by Jens F. Laurson

Einojuhani Rautavaara is a most wonderful composer of the 20th (and 21st) century; a giant of beauty who left a catalogue of great music when he died in the summer of 2016. I first noticed him when the then barely 20-year-old Finnish conductor/violinist Mikko Franck... Continue Reading

Lintu, Hewitt return to the BSO

Conductor Hannu Lintu

Hannu Lintu is not concerned much with subtlety. The Finnish conductor, who last appeared with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2013, tends toward out-sized, expressive gestures. In his latest program with the band from Charm City, heard on Saturday night in the Music Center at Strathmore, broad strokes most suited him, especially in a hard-lined performance of Dvořák's eighth symphony.

The high point of the evening was a performance of Cantus Arcticus by the late Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. The piece was composed in the 1970s, and it feels like it, in an Age of Aquarius kind of way. Its principal gesture, incorporating slightly manipulated recordings of birds taken by the composer in the Arctic Circle, was nothing new, going back to Respighi's Pines of Rome and to countless compositions before the advent of recording. Most bird calls are atonal, of course, and consist essentially of clusters, which Rautavaara captures in the instrumental writing for paired flutes and paired trumpets. Nothing much happens over the course of twenty minutes, but the atmospheric effect of the piece is quite pleasing.

Angela Hewitt's last concerto appearance in the area was an underwhelming Mozart concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2014. Results were better this time around in Beethoven's first concerto, heard just earlier this month from Emanuel Ax and the NSO. Hewitt dialed back the tempo of the first movement especially, creating a mellow feel, even in the extended cadenza, conceived more as gentle spirals than violent zig-zags. The second movement was expressive and the best coordinated of the three between Lintu and Hewitt, with a peppy finale to tie things up. The staid crowd did not cheer loudly enough to warrant the encore Hewitt reportedly played at other performances.

Lintu's Sibelius has been much to my liking over the years, and the Rautavaara had many of the same qualities. His Dvořák, by contrast, felt strident and forced, especially the berserk drive of the finale. It was crack ensemble playing, held together by Lintu's fastidious and severe pacing, but it felt breathless and harried, and not in a good way. Impressive, certainly, but somehow too impatient.

CD Reviews: Rautavaara's 'Rubáiyát' / Stenz's Henze

Charles T. Downey, CD reviews: Late works by late composers Rautavaara, Henze
Washington Post, August 26

E. Rautavaara, Rubáiyát (inter alia), G. Finley, M. Pohjonen, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Helsinki Music Centre Choir, J. Storgårds (released on May 13, 2016) Ondine ODE1274-2 | 59'29"

Einojuhani Rautavaara, Finland’s leading composer, died in July. This new disc from the Ondine label, which has produced more than 40 recordings of Rautavaara’s music, contains some of his final works. If the death of Pierre Boulez earlier this year signaled the end of serialism’s attempted stranglehold on composition, Rautavaara had already found one way around that dogmatic dead end. Having experimented with the 12-tone technique and other modernist approaches, he changed direction after his fourth symphony (“Arabescata”) and, more convincingly than some other more purely neo-Romantic composers (Pärt, Tavener, Górecki), sought a mixture of tonal harmony and melodic dissonance.

The oldest piece on this release is four choral excerpts from Rautavaara’s last opera, “Rasputin.” They are some of the best parts of that unwieldy and fascinating work, premiered in Helsinki in 2003. In particular, the last of them, “Loista, Siion, Loista!” (“Shine, Zion, shine!”), is a riotous orgy of sound, with litany-like repetitions and apocalyptic clatter of percussion. “Into the Heart of Light” (Canto V), premiered in 2012, was the last of Rautavaara’s Canto string orchestra pieces, a series of compositional self-portraits he had been creating since the 1960s. While Canto V opens in lush tonal harmony, the frequency of dissonance is heightened, until in the last four minutes, the violins soar together in an arching series of chromatic clusters. Clashing minor seconds suggest the intensity of bright light.

John Storgards leads loving, informed performances by the Helsinki Philharmonic and Helsinki Music Center Choir. In “Balada,” premiered in 2015, Rautavaara set surrealist Spanish poetry by Federico García Lorca, somewhat awkwardly and monotonously, in a work — sung here by tenor Mika Pohjonen — that was originally conceived as an opera but that perhaps should have been left in Rautavaara’s desk drawer.

The baritone Gerald Finley and London’s Wigmore Hall played a crucial role in Rautavaara’s completion of a long-planned song cycle on the hedonistic verse of medieval Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Finley premiered the version for piano in 2014, using the rhymed English translation by Edward FitzGerald, “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” and he is the skilled soloist here in the orchestral version. Instrumental interludes flow from the ends of the first four songs, as if, in the composer’s words, “this music did not want to stop and simply should flow onward,” like the wine that yields miracles.

***

H. W. Henze, Symphony No. 7 (inter alia), Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, M. Stenz (released on June 10, 2016) Oehms Classics OC446| 65'46"

The German composer Hans Werner Henze was a brilliant orchestral colorist. The best parts of his late opera “L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe” (“Upupa and the Triumph of Filial Love”), for example, were the intricate, gorgeous combinations of wind instruments, delicate tinkling percussion, and recorded sounds of bird wings and birdsongs. The German conductor Markus Stenz, now the principal guest conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who conducted the world premiere of “L’Upupa” at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2003, has recorded two collections of Henze’s orchestral music with his former group, the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the second released this summer.

The new disc centers on Henze’s seventh symphony, composed from 1983 to 1984. Henze conceived the work’s four movements in homage to the traditional Germanic symphony. The first movement, “Tanz,” is rhythmically effervescent. Masses of chaotic dissonance rise up here and in the otherwise lush “mourning ode” movement that follows. Henze connected the symphony to the life of Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet who had a mental breakdown in Tübingen, living his last 36 years in a tower room overlooking the Neckar river. The finale, an instrumental rendition of Hölderlin’s poem “Hälfte des Lebens” (“Half of Life”), is the best part of this often too-cacophonous symphony; here, Henze’s orchestration is at its most colorful, somehow sheltered from total chaos. Stenz delivers one of the fastest recordings of this work on record.

Henze was even more effective in smaller orchestral pieces. The “Seven Boleros” are short, evocative pieces for a large orchestra, originally written for Henze’s opera “Venus and Adonis.” Fandango and other Latin rhythms enliven the texture. Fun saxophone solos are complemented by traces of castanets and snare drum. Any conductor thinking of programming Ravel’s “Boléro” should instead put this in its place, while still calling the program “Boleros” to get people to buy tickets.

Two miniatures round out the selection. “L’Heure Bleue,” a chamber arrangement of music from “L’Upupa,” is a musical tribute to the infinite changing shades of blue at dusk on the Mediterranean coast, as Henze saw it from his home in Italy. “Overture for a Theater” was commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin to mark its 100th anniversary, in 2012; it’s a barnburner that ends with an apocalyptic clamor. It turned out to be the last piece Henze completed; he died only a few days after he attended the performance.

SEE ALSO:
Charles T. Downey, Opera on DVD: 'Rasputin' (Ionarts, November 29, 2006)

Michael Hoffmann, The unquenchable spirit (The Guardian, November 19, 2004)

Friedrich Hölderlin, Hälfte des Lebens (Half of Life)

Choral Arts Chamber Singers Go Finnish

E. Rautavaara, Works for Mixed Chorus, Finnish Radio Chamber Choir, E.-O. Söderström (Ondine, 1996)

Charles T. Downey, Choral Arts Chamber Singers perform ‘Under the Midnight Sun’ (Washington Post, October 20, 2014)

Scott Tucker was appointed artistic director of the Choral Arts Society of Washington in 2012. As the ensemble nears its 50th anniversary next year, Tucker has instituted the Choral Arts Chamber Singers, a small chorus within the chorus that gave its first concert on Friday night at Falls Church Episcopal. The new series allows the musicians to explore a different repertoire beyond the big choral chestnuts with orchestra that are their normal bread and butter... [Continue reading]

Choral Arts Chamber Singers
Under the Midnight Sun
Music by Finnish composers
Falls Church Episcopal

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Charles T. Downey, Library of Congress’s contemporary music show scores
Washington Post, April 11, 2014

E. Rautavaara, String Quintet No. 1 (inter alia), Sibelius Quartet, J.-E. Gustafsson (Ondine, 1998)

The past week’s concert schedule has been loaded with contemporary music, from an anniversary celebration for Louis Andriessen to a residency by British composer Oliver Knussen. In the midst of it all, the Library of Congress hosted a performance of yet more recent music on Thursday night, as part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s touring program. A slate of musicians performed selections from the last two decades, which were paired with the monumental “Quartet for the End of Time” by Olivier Messiaen.

Pierre Jalbert’s... [Continue reading]

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Music by Jalbert, Carter, Rautavaara, Messiaen
Library of Congress

SEE ALSO:
Einojuhani Rautavaara, Rasputin (2006) | Percussion concerto with BSO
Rautavaara's conclusion to Sibelius's sixth symphony (Vienna Symphony)

For Your Consideration: 'Le Havre'

Finnish writer and director Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America) has returned to film in France for his latest feature, Le Havre. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was warmly received at the Cannes Festival last May, and Finland has submitted it as their official entry for the Academy Award in Foreign Film, where its odd combination of whimsy and social consciousness may give it an edge on the competition. The lead character is Marcel, an itinerant shoeblack, played by André Wilms (Europa Europa), reprising the same character he played in La Vie de Bohème, Kaurismäki's last movie produced in France, from 1992. Marcel stands at the ready in the train station or wherever men walk by, with his eyes firmly fixed on their shoes. The themes explored here, immigration and poverty, are familiar from La Vie de Bohème, a retelling of Henri Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème with a bunch of artistic immigrants in Paris. At one point, Marcel recalls his Bohemian life in Paris, explaining that he fell into drinking, was rescued by Arletty, his patient Finnish wife (Kati Outinen, a Kaurismäki favorite), and now lives this simple life in the gritty town of Le Havre.

Simple, that is, until at the port a container, bound from Gabon to London, is found to contain human cargo. An African boy (Blondin Miguel) escapes from the police, and Marcel gives him food and help: he finally becomes a house guest at the instigation of the couple's sweetly protective dog, Laïka (played by Kaurismäki's own pet of the same name). The film's bright colors, part of a quirky vision of a small, rainy town, recall the films of Jacques Demy, whose wistful, odd stories were set in places like Cherbourg and Rochefort. The piliers du bar sit at the local watering hole, La Moderne, debating which region of France is the best: a Breton claims that Brittany is a culture, not just a region, and they cannot even agree if Brittany or Normandy can claim Mont St. Michel (it is in Normandy), and so on. The film looks and feels like it is set in the 60s, in a town that time forgot, but it is clearly meant to be happening in the last decade. At one point the characters watch a television news report about the riots and closure of the refugee camp at Sangatte, known as "La Jungle," which was closed in 2002 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior. In its vision of a France that may once have been and that really should be (but perhaps is not), Le Havre features the same sort of guilty nostalgia of which Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie was accused.

Other Reviews: Los Angeles Times | New York Times | Washington Post | Village Voice Roger Ebert | NPR | Movie Review Intelligence

Another Kaurismäki favorite, Evelyne Didi, is back as Yvette, the kindly boulangère who helps the couple, driving them to the hospital when Arletty discovers she has a terrible illness. Later, she is shown reading from Kafka's short story Children on a Country Road, as Arletty falls asleep in the hospital: Kafka's wandering narration from the mind of a child seems to have informed the movie's structure. Kaurismäki has a way with lingering close-ups, shoulder-length, a way of plumbing character or the significance of a moment, as when the camera assesses each of the stowaways when an outlandishly immense government force, combining armed police and paramedics, opens the shipping container (cinematography by Timo Salminen).

Music is crucial to the story, too, from orchestral music by Einojuhani Rautavaara, to Le Havre local rocker Little Bob, to the melancholy chansons sung by Damia and others, and the LP of Statesboro Blues played by Blind Willie McTell (the resonance with African mal du pays is palpable as the boy, Idrissa, listens to it). Kaurismäki embeds all sorts of references to other films in Le Havre, not least in the cameo by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who played Truffaut in all of Truffaut's biographical films, as a suspicious informer. The gruff inspector on the trail of the boy, whimsically named Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), riffs on Claude Rains' Captain Renault in Casablanca, for example, and mining the movie for its many references and allusions should keep film buffs happy.

This film opens today, exclusively at the E Street Cinema.

Vienna Weekend

Renaissance man--Homo Universalis, if you wish--Tzimon Barto, a soon-to-be-regular in Washington, performed with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at the Musikverein last weekend in a program that coupled the 20^th century Nordics Einojuhani Rautavaara and Sibelius with Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1. The VSO’s music director Fabio Luisi had to replace Mikko Franck who bailed out on scheduling issues, and impressively did so without changing the program despite not having conducted either the Sibelius (Symphony No.5), or the Rautavaara (“Apotheosis”, the re-worked finale of his Sixth Symphony) before.

J.Sibelius, Symphony No.5 (two versions), O.Vänskä / Lahti SO BIS

Tchaikovsky is among those composes whose beauty can easily be taken for granted… a failing I am not immune to. I was moved by the nuanced and very flexible opening of Barto’s, intelligently moving between brawn and lurid tenderness where many another interpreter merely thrashes the hell out of the instrument, to ever less effect the louder they play. As familiarity set in, I was only occasionally jolted out of the Tchaikovsky-routine: for worse when the clanky upper register of the instrument called strident attention to itself; for better when the second movement’s duos between first the cello and piano then the oboe and piano were played with gallantly-fresh accentuation. I found myself rather less in the position to extract anything particular special from the finale, but judging from the excited hollers and “Bravos” from the otherwise reserved Musikverein audience, it must have been a greater success of communicating a particular vision than I picked up on. (A few naifs in the audience had even dare applauded after the first movement... followed, without fail, by the haughty hissers. It's good to know that modern audiences know better how to reverently treat a Tchaikovsky concerto than, say, Tchaikovsky himself.) As it turned out, that particular warm reception would be a blessing because it elicited an encore from Barto, who played Schumann’s Mignon. Playing with the softest of touches—which, despite superficial suggestions that it might be otherwise, suits this musician best—he forced the ears to focus, forced a natural hushed silence onto the audience, and delivered something unreservedly magnificent. Radically daring pianissimo is where, for all his ability to destroy any instrument of choice, Barto’s true strength lies.

For Finn Mikko Franck, already a veteran conductor at the tender age of thirty-something, programming Sibelius and Rautavaara made eminent sense—he is on record, after all, claiming Rautavaara “the best composer. Period.” It has been over ten years since I read that statement of his (I remember him conducting a Shostakovich Seventh Symphony with the Munich Philharmonic, then barely into his twenties), and perhaps it was a comment borne out of youthful enthusiasm, meant to make a statement more than anything else. But the statement certain had had its effect on me. Never having even heard of Rautavaara before that, I have keenly followed the composer’s output since—which thanks to the many excellent recordings on the Ondine label is easy. “Best composer, ever” might be pushing it, but certainly one of the most interesting and enjoyable composers of our time. For Luisi—who is more of a stranger to these musical ideas of north—to leave the program intact was laudable and daring. Laudable to bring composers unknown or neglected in continental Europe to an audience not likely to get much exposure to this music; daring because it meant entering a different language.

The ruminatingly-gorgeous sounds of Rautavaara’s “Apotheosis” were bleeding through the doors of Musikverein as I made my belated way back to the seats for Sibelius. The beginning of this gorgeous work—probably the second-most accessible of Sibelius’ Symphonies after the terrific, relatively conventional Second—was precise and unafraid of jarring sounds. The separation of instrumental groups—as if put together from extensive Stimmproben and then skillfully re-arranged into proper common order—sounded like an interpretive choice for a while. Then the confusion set in. Not unlike Bruckner I’ve heard in Italy, this sounded like the perfectly proper recitation of a poem in a language the speaker doesn’t actually understand. All the letters and words are there and in the right order, but the sense is lost somewhere between them. It’s not entirely surprising that Sibelius still baffles many continental listeners when faced with performances itself so thoroughly baffling. Consequently the applause was gentle and confused, leaving open the question whether the case of Sibelius had been served or not, that Friday night.

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Poulenc’s Trois Movements is a gay and frolicking little nonet for winds, strings, and a horn, rather typical of Poulenc’s engaging chamber music and it opened a matinee at the Vienna Konzerthaus I attended. Admittedly, I wasn’t there for the nine members of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra to perform Poulenc, and had I been, I might have been more disappointed with the ‘it’s-too-early-in-the-morning-to-be-doing-this’ performance than I was. I was there to hear the young cellist Julian Steckel, the freshly crowned winner of the ARD Competition. To say I was underwhelmed with the whole cellist’s side of this year’s ARD Competition—including Steckel, even as I, too, thought him primus inter pares—would be putting it kindly. All the more reason then to hear him in his natural environment: under non-competition conditions in a concert hall; a ‘real’ performance, conducted by his teacher and (former) colleague Heinrich Schiff.

Saint-Saëns & Dvořák, Cello Concertos, du Pré / Barenboim, Celibidache / Philadelphia, Swedish RSO Teldec

My impression of his being awarded the ARD prize was that he received it based on what the jury knew he has been and would be capable of, rather than what they heard from him during those weeks. That might not be my idea of how to dole out prizes at competitions, but it serves well enough to pique my intrigue, of wanting to hear that potential materialize; perhaps in this performance on a grisly-gray, misty Sunday morning in Vienna, with the ear-pleasing Saint-Saëns Concerto No.1 in a-minor. And voila: the bold opening was right on, Steckel’s sound easily filing the Konzerthaus’ smaller, charming Mozart Hall. Technically unimpeachable, interpretively polite, and enhanced by an obvious sensitivity to what he was playing, this was a different league from the competition performances—supported by the sincerely engaged orchestra under an engagedly baton-waving Schiff, who looks ever more like a rotund, friendly bear on his quest for another pot of honey-mead.

Hannu Lintu with the BSO

Conductor Hannu Lintu

Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu, recently appointed as music director of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland, impressed me when he stepped in for Xian Zhang to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra last year. Not only did he replace her, Lintu conducted the very program of unusual works scheduled for Zhang and on fairly short notice: one of them he had happened to conduct just before he came to Washington but he learned the others on the fly. What would he be like in this weekend's concerts with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, in a program that he had actually had a hand in shaping? As experienced on Saturday night, when the BSO came to the Music Center at Strathmore, even though the repertory was much less interesting, Lintu was just as impressive.

We will take Sibelius any way we can, even if it is the tone poem Finlandia, which even the composer himself found a little overrated. Lintu's shaping of the work was all edges, with the brass encouraged to thunder and echo in the famous opening ("Finland, Awake!"), with extra low rumbling added by the basses. Stark woodwinds opened the vista further, as the music evoked a barren, rocky expanse. Lintu's insistent gestures, at times his arms wind-milling around wildly, set the fast section of the piece on edge. Another, more mystical side of Finnish music was shown in the U.S. premiere of a new percussion concerto by Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), Incantations. Premiered by the London Philharmonic at Royal Festival Hall last October, the work attempts to depict the spell-casting and spiritual dream-states of a shaman.

Other Articles: Tim Smith, Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu makes electric debut with Baltimore Symphony (Baltimore Sun, April 9) Jordan Edwards, Mallet man (Montgomery County Gazette, April 7) Ivan Hewett, Rautavaara premiere at Festival Hall (The Telegraph, October 26, 2009) Hilary Finch, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Nezet-Seguin at the Festival Hall (The Times, October 27, 2009) Martin Kettle, LPO/Nézet-Séguin (The Guardian, October 26, 2009)

The main theme -- opening the first movement and returning at the end of the third, like a cheesy Puccini melody -- is Romantic enough to sound like Rachmaninoff, except that it is harmonized with so many dissonant clashes, including major-minor chords. Rautavaara conceived the solo part for percussionist Colin Currie (who performed it again here, quite ably and with dramatic flair), focusing it mostly on pitched percussion, especially xylophone and vibes, switching to louder, unpitched instruments when the orchestra is at its fullest. By the standards of modern percussion concertos Rautavaara's remains on the conservative side of things -- by comparison to Jennifer Higdon, for example, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Music, not for her percussion concerto but for the far superior violin concerto (which I had already declared as Higdon's best work in the genre). In the second movement, which keeps the soloist on vibes throughout, some parts could be mistaken for a Henry Mancini score.

The multi-metric rhythms (mostly 7/8) in the third movement seemed hackneyed, but the soloist's cadenza here, which reportedly was partly improvised by Currie on the spot, was thrilling. Lintu gave the score as much interest as he could, but it did not strike me as being a work of great significance beyond one performance. Lintu then gave Beethoven's seventh symphony -- if pressed, my choice for the composer's most perfect work -- a thoroughly considered and yet nearly reckless interpretation. He carefully weighted the orchestra's dynamic contrasts, pulling back particular sections or the entire texture, a reticence -- as in the hushed fugal section of the first movement -- that added punch to the loud passages. The insistent march of the second movement was expansive and yet propelled, while the third movement's athletic pacing was exceeded only by the almost chaotic rush of the fourth.

While the BSO's 2009-2010 season was disappointingly lackluster, the line-up for 2010-2011 is much more encouraging. Alsop will focus on some of the great 19th- and 20th-century symphonists, including Mahler (the seventh and tenth symphonies, as well as Das Lied von der Erde, but with no soloists announced yet), Shostakovich (the first, fifth, and tenth, the last with Günther Herbig at the podium, plus the first violin concerto with Midori), Bruckner (the sixth, coupled with Yuja Wang playing Rachmaninoff), and Prokofiev (the first and sixth in a single program). Throw in Ingrid Fliter playing Chopin's second piano concerto, Baiba Skride playing Berg's violin concerto, and rarities like Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra and William Walton's first symphony, and there are plenty of concerts we will want to experience. Not to mention a couple of new works, like Philip Glass's Icarus at the Edge of Time and an unspecified new piece commissioned from Osvaldo Golijov. Let us hope that the BSO can survive its latest salary cuts for the musicians: get out there and buy some tickets!

Opera on DVD: Rasputin

Available at Amazon: Rautavaara, Rasputin, Matti Salminen, Jorma Hynninen, Finnish National Opera (released on August 9, 2005)

Einojuhani Rautavaara is part of the remarkable wave of new opera composition in Finland. His last opera, Rasputin, was commissioned by the Finnish National Opera and given its world premiere in Helsinki in 2003. Although Rautavaara revised the opera for a subsequent staging in Lübeck (February 2006, including revising the title role for a baritone instead of a bass), it is the Helsinki version that was captured on this DVD, released by Ondine last year, to glowing reviews in Opera News and elsewhere.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (né Novyh) is a natural fit for opera, a mysterious and charismatic figure who loved passionately, survived assassination attempts by poison and stabbing, and then was shot and thrown into a river. True, Deborah Drattell's opera on the same story -- Nicholas and Alexandra, premiered at Los Angeles Opera in 2003, with Plácido Domingo as the Mad Monk -- was not a success, and Jay Reise's Rasputin fared no better at its New York City Opera premiere in 1988. (Nicolas Nabokov also attempted an opera on the story, Der Tod des Grigori Rasputin, in 1959.) Rautavaara, however, got it right, working from his own libretto. Most of the opera's appeal lies in his simultaneously seductive and repulsive characterization of Rasputin.

Bass Matti Salminen brings his vast, resonant voice and hulking presence to the title role. His first big aria ("There the crane flies over the tundra"), as he sings to the Tsarevich, the Romanovs' child who suffers from haemophilia, to calm him, is gorgeous. The words tell about taking a trip to Siberia, the cranes over the tundra, white swans, wild geese, what the echo replies to the bird calls, while the music repeats again and again cyclically and ends suddenly. (You bass-baritones out there should be learning this piece for recitals.) The music lulls the listener into believing Rasputin's line of crap through the magnificent choral scene at the end of first scene. An orgy of sound, it grows louder and louder, with apocalyptic percussion, dancers, and chorus costumed as bleeding, thorn-crowned Christs. I was mesmerized by it, until Mrs. Ionarts informed me that the sound was booming throughout the house and might wake up the children.

Rautavaara loses me, slightly, only in the tangle of subplots and minor characters. The opera has 27 (!) singing roles, and many of them essentially blend in with the chorus. The decadent nobles who eventually succeed in killing Rasputin are led by Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich (baritone Gabriel Suovanen) and Prince Felix Yusupov (tenor Jyrki Anttila). Tsarina Alexandra repeats rumors that the two men are in a homosexual relationship, that Felix is a cross-dresser: she refuses to let her daughter, Olga, be married to Dmitry. Several bishops or patriarchs foment discord among the crowds by spreading rumors of the Tsarevich's illness: they are in cahoots with a strange character, Mitya of Kozelski (character tenor Lassi Virtanen), who stutters and rides around, crippled, on some sort of skateboard, punctuating his lines with the crack of a whip. The best singing after Salminen's Rasputin comes from mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivi, as the pathetically credulous German-born Tsarina Alexandra.

Just as in the DVD of Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin, the Finnish National Opera demonstrates how much new operas benefit from lavish productions. That is, that new operas might have more of a chance of pleasing audiences if they are cast with major singers and attractively staged. In this gorgeous production directed by Vilppu Kiljunen, the viewer is immediately submerged in the emotional distress of the imperial parents as their young son suffers another attack of hemophilia. During the opera's dissonant introduction, Tsarina Alexandra, highlighted by a follow spot, rushes around the vertiginous, swirling sets designed by Hannu Lindholm.

The score blends music in many styles, with disorienting and acidic dissonance to create dramatic tension, but Rautavaara is not afraid of lush, more tonal harmonies. There are moments of extraordinary beauty, like the Easter scene in Act II, with a choral setting of the Regina caeli (in Finnish) and Rasputin's triumphant proclamation of the Resurrection ("Khristos voskrese!") answered by the crowd. Most critics usually label Rautavaara as a mystic composer, in line with composers like Pärt, Tavener, Gorecki, using more or less tonal harmonies, ethereal or austere orchestration, and chant-like melodies. That description holds true for much of the score of Rasputin.

Rautavaara has created some fine ensemble pieces for the Tsar's four daughters, sung here by Sari Aittokoski (Olga), Tuija Knihtilâ (Tatyana), Helena Juntunen (Maria), and Anna-Kristiina Kaappola (Anastasia). Rautavaara uses his orchestra (here the FNO orchestra, conducted well by Mikko Franck, to whom the score is dedicated) in a mostly traditional way, with some effects thrown in, like Lady Macbeth-like erotic trombone slides, what sounds like a slide whistle (a theremin?), and a salon air played by an onstage piano ("A troika speeds through the woods"). Definitely worth your time.

Ondine ODV 4003

A very interesting upcoming DVD release from Ondine is Karita Mattila's recital on the stage of the Finnish National Opera, a program that includes Kaija Saariaho's song cycle Quatre instants, due out next spring.