On March 25, Naxos releases the latest recording of works by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, featuring the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and its dynamic young Music Director Pietari Inkinen. The three works featured— Apotheosis; Manhattan Trilogy; and Symphony No. 8 (Naxos 8570069)—are indicative of the direction that Rautavaara’s orchestral music has taken during the last decade.
Apotheosis (1996) is a revision of the final movement from Rautavaara’s Sixth Symphony
(1992), which was the symphonic reworking of music from the opera Vincent, hence the subtitle ‘Vincentiana’. The instrumentation lacks the synthesizer that evokes the paintings of the Dutch master in the opera, but the musical substance is intact.
Manhattan Trilogy (2004) is one of Rautavaara’s recent orchestral works, commissioned by the The Juilliard School for its centennial season and first performed by the Juilliard Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies in October 2005. Consisting of three movements—Daydreams, Nightmares and Dawn—Manhattan Trilogy does not constitute a symphonic piece as such. Its slow-fast-slow sequence equates to classical precedent, while the thematic working and textural elaboration follow directly from the composer’s practice in his last four symphonies.
Given its première by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Wolfgang Sawallisch in April 2000, the Eighth Symphony (1999) remains Rautavaara’s most recent contribution to the genre. Subtitled ‘The Journey’, it pursues its metamorphosis of ideas in ways similar to those of his previous three symphonies, but here the order of movements is nearly Classical; pointedly so in the second and third, whose contrast is emphasized by a lack of pause between movements.
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1946, is the country’s leading professional orchestra. It has an establishment of ninety players and performs over 100 concerts annually. They tour extensively within their own country.
Music Director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Pietari Inkinen is one of the most exciting talents of the new generation of conductors. He has collaborated with major orchestras and with soloists such as Vadim Repin, Hilary Hahn, and Pinchas Zukerman. His recording with the Bavarian Chamber Philharmonic has received outstanding reviews and was voted the BBC Music Magazine’s recording of the month. His recordings for Naxos include works by Sibelius and Rautavaara with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, as well as recordings with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony, and the Avanti Chamber Orchestra. Inkinen also is an accomplished violinist. He has appeared as soloist with many of the leading Finnish orchestras including the Finnish Radio Symphony and Helsinki Philharmonic, with which he performed the Sibelius Concerto in a celebration of the centenary of their performance of the work.
Leonardo BALADA
María Sabina (1969); Dionisio: In Memoriam (2001)
Soloists; Orchestra and Chorus of the Comunidad de Madrid;
José Ramón Encinar;
Naxos 8570425
Barcelona native Leonardo Balada is credited with pioneering a blend of ethnic music and avant-garde techniques. The symphonic tragedy María Sabina, one of his best-known works, tells the extraordinary story of Sabina, a Mexican Indian mushroom-cult priestess who meets fierce resistance from her people when endeavoring to open the holy rituals to the outside world. Some of the text in Balada’s work is based on her incantations, of which the composer has written: “While composing the work, the power of the text was so extraordinary that I felt inspired by it. I recall composing the music even when I was travelling, in airports or hotels.”
The cantata Dionisio: In Memoriam is an homage to Dionisio Ridruejo, a poet and politician from Soria, Spain, on whose ideological, philosophical and descriptive writings the work is based.
Born in Barcelona on 22nd September 1933, Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu there and in 1960 from The Juilliard School in New York. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti and Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, where he is University Professor of Composition. Some of his best-known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s, including Guernica (Naxos 8557342), María Sabina, and Steel Symphony. Balada is credited with blending traditional cultural music and avant-garde compositional practices to create his personal, influential style.
Karol SZYMANOWSKI
Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3; Symphony No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19;
Symphony No. 3, Op. 27, ‘Piesn o nocy’ (Song of the Night)
Ewa Marczyk (violin solo), Ryszard Minkiewicz (tenor),
Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra (Chorus-master: Henryk Wojnarowski), Antoni Wit
Naxos 8570721
Composed in 1910, when Szymanowski felt the influences of Richard Strauss, Reger and Scriabin, the unusually structured Symphony No. 2 is a work of power and invention, with passionate and varied contrasts in its use of solo instruments, especially the violin.
Szymanowski’s Third Symphony, completed in 1916 after two years’ work, received its premiere in London in 1921. The work, in which orchestra and singers are subtly blended in a continuous web of intoxicating sound, contains hints of Debussy’s influence. Its central theme is the composer’s reinterpretation of the thoughts and words of the great medieval Persian mystic Mevlânâ, our Master, Jalal ad-Din, founder of the order of “whirling dervishes.”
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