Autumn 2020 Season

As Finland pushed for independence from Russia towards the end of the 19th century, its artists started soul-searching. Painters, writers and composers like Sibelius celebrated the country’s tradition of stoicism – the Lutheran perseverance, meteorological fortitude and collective resolve that had seen them through past struggles and hopefully would again.

That determination rings through En Saga. The title is difficult to translate from the Swedish, but refers literally to ‘a tale’. It conjured up ideas of setting forth into the wild unknown, confronting whatever might come your way.

Sibelius was interested in primitivism when he wrote the piece, particularly in painting. He wanted to combine beauty and brutality – obviousness and subtlety. He did so using layers of patterns and chant-like themes that meld into one another, like the circular songs of the rune singers who told Finland’s ancient stories in song.

En Saga unfurls using the simplest material but soon becomes hypnotic – ‘a state of mind’ in Sibelius’s words. ‘In none of my other works have I revealed myself so completely,’ he also said of the piece, 50 years after he had written it.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Jean Sibelius
^1865–1957

As a young boy, Sibelius made rapid progress as a violinist and composer. In 1886, he abandoned law studies at Helsinki University, enrolling at the Helsinki Conservatory and later taking lessons in Berlin and Vienna. The young composer drew inspiration from the Finnish ancient epic, the Kalevala, a rich source of Finnish cultural identity. These sagas of the remote Karelia region greatly appealed to Sibelius, especially those concerned with the dashing youth Lemminkäinen and the bleak landscape of Tuonela, the kingdom of death – providing the literary background for his early tone-poems, beginning with the mighty choral symphony Kullervo in 1892.

The Finns swiftly adopted Sibelius and his works as symbols of national pride, particularly following the premiere of the overtly patriotic Finlandia in 1900, composed a few months after Finland’s legislative rights had been taken away by Russia. The public in Finland recognised the idealistic young composer as a champion of national freedom.

Although Sibelius lived to the age of 91, he effectively abandoned composition almost 30 years earlier. Heavy drinking, illness, relentless self-criticism and financial problems were among the conditions that influenced his early retirement. He was, however, honoured as a great Finnish hero long after he ceased composing, while his principal works became established as an essential part of the orchestral repertoire.

^{Composer profile by Andrew Stewart}

Mendelssohn wanted his adopted hometown of Leipzig to have a thriving musical life. One of his key allies in that project was a violinist called Ferdinand David. Mendelssohn hired him as a teacher for his music school and a leader for his orchestra.

David was among the best violinists of his day. His playing was so seductive that it led Mendelssohn to convert a piano concerto he was writing into a concerto for violin instead.

Mendelssohn prized order, balance and sensitivity in music. His Violin Concerto embodies those principles while still managing to sound fervent and joyous. The composer wanted the piece to sound fluent and continuous, like a flowing stream. Unusually, all three movements are linked: the first two by a single note on the bassoon, the second and third third via a short intermezzo.

The Violin Concerto is also a masterpiece of economy. The soloist enters almost immediately with the concerto’s arresting main tune. The middle movement is a distilled ‘song without words’, and the last frolics and celebrates but with the lightness of a soufflé.
 

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Felix Mendelssohn
^1809–47

Grandson of the influential Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was a remarkable child prodigy. Born in Hamburg, he grew up in Berlin, where the family settled in 1811. His parents converted to Lutheranism and, like his three siblings, Felix was baptised in childhood; nevertheless, he refused to change his surname entirely to his father’s chosen ‘Bartholdy’.

With an intense work ethic, he took great interest in culture of all kinds: he was a fine writer and painter, and corresponded with Goethe while still a boy. He remained close all his life to his elder sister, Fanny, also a prodigiously gifted composer, who was forbidden by their father to follow music as a profession.

Mendelssohn became one of the most significant musical figures of his day, as composer, conductor, pianist and educator. His grandmother presented him, while he was still a teenager, with the remarkable gift of the manuscript of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which had lain unperformed for decades; the youthful composer resuscitated and conducted it in 1829. He travelled widely, visiting Britain ten times and becoming a personal favourite of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Appointed conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835, he settled in the city, where he went on to found a music conservatory that became one of the most important in Europe. Somehow he also found time to marry Cécile Jeanrenaud and have five children.

His propensity for overwork nevertheless led to tragedy: he died at the age of 38 in 1847, having suffered a series of strokes, just six months after his sister Fanny had succumbed to the same fate.

_{Composer profile by Jessica Duchen}

This piece is derived from a bigger one: a score for orchestra and singers by Kaija Saariaho titled The Passion of Simone. It is a large-scaled reflection on the life and work of Simone Weill, a philosopher and political activist from France who died young in 1943.

In January 2009, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic gave a performance of the Passion. As a gift, Saariaho took one section of the piece that she knew Salonen particularly liked – the ‘eighth station’ – and reimagined it for orchestra alone.

Generally speaking, Saariaho was inspired by Sibelius’s interest in self-developing textures (as heard in En Saga) and French impressionism’s emphasis on pure beauty and colour. Listening to Saariaho, nothing is ever quite as it seems: her orchestra is thick but translucent, moving imperceptibly like tides, with an oceanic weight and glisten.

Lumière et Pesanteur plays with lightness and gravity. Instruments pass delicate tunes over the top of a shimmering orchestral texture filled with distinctive combinations of instruments.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Kaija Saariaho
^{b. 1952}

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish artists who are making a worldwide impact. She studied in Helsinki, Fribourg and Paris, where, at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, she developed techniques of computer-assisted composition and acquired fluency working with tape and live electronics. These experiences influenced her approach to writing for orchestra, with its emphasis on shaping dense masses of sound in slow transformations.

Her first orchestral piece, Verblendungen (1984), involves a gradual exchange of
roles and character between orchestra and tape. Furthermore, the titles of her linked orchestral works Du Cristal (1989) and … à la Fumée (1990) suggest her preoccupation with colour and texture.

Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, she has turned increasingly to larger forces and forms, for pieces such as Orion (2004), Laterna Magica (2008) and Circle Map (2008). Her notation is highly detailed, using harmonics, microtones and a spectrum of instructions on producing sound, from pure sounds to unpitched noise. She made her first foray into opera in the late 1990s, and with outstanding success, composing L’Amour de loin (2000), Adriana Mater (2005), Emilie (2010) and the oratorio La Passion de Simone (2006).

Saariaho has won major composing awards, such as the Grawemeyer Award, Wihuri Sibelius Prize, Nemmers Prize, Sonning Prize and Polar Music Prize. She also adjudicates, and in 2015 she was the judge of the Tōru Takemitsu Composition Award.

^{Composer profile by Anthony Burton}

Sibelius wrote Cassazione quickly in early 1904, in order to fill out a concert that would introduce his new Violin Concerto on 8 February in Helsinki. The piece is in one movement but distinct episodes. ‘Cassazione’ or ‘cassation’ is derived from the German for alley (‘Gasse’) and normally refers to music written for performance outdoors.

It starts with a tune that climbs up and down through three notes in a minor key, pre-empting Monty Norman’s famous ‘007’ theme. The entire opening passage has an aura of mountains rather than streets, and could easily introduce a Bond movie.

Nonetheless, Sibelius’s own distinctive style is easy to hear. A circular woodwind tune with echoes of En Saga emerges. It is tightly harmonised before graduating onto brass. Strings labour with fortitude through patterned sequences, as in Sibelius’ recent Symphony No 2.

The woodwind theme then takes on the feeling of a Russian orthodox chant, moving to strings before being reimagined as a waltz and then a pastoral cart-ride that runs into dark clouds. A long oboe solo heralds the work’s culmination: a no-nonsense celebration of a hard-won victory.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}