The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra’s very own Maria Krykov performs as the soloist for Missy Mazzoli's double bass concerto in a concert by this season's artist-in-residence Pekka Kuusisto. The composer's muse was a double bass built in 1580 and forgotten in an Italian convent for hundreds of years. “I imagined this instrument as a historian, an object that collected the music of the passing centuries in the twists of its neck and the fibres of its wood, finally emerging into the light at age 400 and singing it all into the world.”
Pekka Kuusisto
Pekka Kuusisto (b. 1976) was already familiar to Finnish TV viewers on winning the 1995 Jean Sibelius Violin Competition, since when he has become possibly the best-known Finnish instrumentalist beyond Finland’s borders. In recent years, he has increasingly taken to conducting as well, and has appeared many times with the HPO as both violinist (most recently on 30.9.) and conductor. His choice of the works to be performed today well reflects his broad attitude to programming. Walker’s appealed to him for its dynamic ruggedness, Rautavaara’s for allowing him to operate with just brass and percussion. He discovered the Moberg suite during an HPO project aiming to unearth gems hidden in the depths of the archives, and he was moved to contact Waller-Bridge after hearing her music for a Hercule Poirot film. Temperatures is a pure concert piece, and Kuusisto hopes she will find time to write more of its kind between writing for the theatre, television and cinema.
Maria Krykov
“The more I play in an orchestra, the more aware I become of the important role of the double bass,” says Helsinki-born Maria Krykov. She had already gained experience of such illustrious orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra before joining the HPO in 2020, and this autumn she began as co-principal double bass in the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra. Krykov has been the winner of many competitions, such as the Bottesini in 2019, the international Leoš Janáček and the Ankara. Tonight she gives her first performance of the work by Missy Mazzoli, on the initiative of Pekka Kuusisto. “It’s a very minimalist, almost cinematographic, and most exceptional work. The bass does not sound as it normally does, because it’s differently tuned. There are many flageolet notes and Mazzoli has written lots of high notes, though this is typical of solo works for the double bass.”
Einojuhani Rautavaara: A Requiem in Our Time
Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016) composed his Requiem in Our Time in 1953, as an entry in the US Thor Johnson competition for a work for brass instruments. It was performed at the competition’s finals in Cincinnati and awarded the first prize. Rautavaara was at the time a conscript in the Finnish army but later, with a recommendation from Jean Sibelius, his victory helped to gain him an opportunity to study in the USA. He dedicated his Requiem to the memory of his mother, who had died when he was 16.
The four-movement Requiem begins with a resolute Hymnus. The following Credo et Dubito contrasts a devout chorale with music that is nothing short of sardonic and is in fact an arrangement of a movement from his Fiddlers suite. Dies Irae is a savage, angry scherzo. The closing Lacrymosa already looks towards the leisurely stroll through the land of beauty characteristic of Rautavaara’s later music.
George Walker: Symphony No. 5 “Visions”
George Walker (1922–2018) was one of the first Afro-Americans to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the first to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music. However, “It’s always nice to be known as the first doing anything, but what’s more important is the recognition that this work has quality,” he said. His career as a concert pianist were defeated by racism, so he turned to composing and teaching instead. In 2016, he was already working on his Symphony No. 5 when he heard that a young white man had shot nine Afro-Americans in Charleston; this left its mark on the one-movement symphony. It exists in two versions. One is for orchestra only, while the other incorporates video images and recitations of texts written by him. The symphony is angry and expressive. The quotations, Walker explained, correspond to the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. “No one can understand each other, no matter how hard they try.” The speaker version even more clearly reflects a society riddled with inequality and violence. “I see the harbors and ports where men enslaved were beaten, chained, auctioned and bought,” says the text at one point.
Missy Mazzoli: Dark with Excessive Bright
“Dark with excessive bright”, a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost, is a surreal and evocative description of God, written by a blind man. I love the impossibility of this phrase, and felt it was a strangely accurate way to describe the dark but heartrending sound of the double bass itself.”
Thus writes American composer, teacher, musician, festival and project activist Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) in speaking of the work on tonight’s programme. Mazzoli is familiar to many for her music for the TV series Mozart in the Jungle. In 2018, she was one of the first two women to be commissioned by the New York Metropolitan to compose an opera. She wrote Dark with Excessive Bright (2018) as a commission for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Aurora Orchestra and was, she says, inspired by music of the Renaissance and Baroque and the double bass from 1580 played by Maxime Bibeau. On seeing the light of day again after being stored in an Italian monastery for over four centuries, the instrument began, as it were, to sing all the music preserved in it.
Isobel Waller-Bridge: Temperatures
Isobel Waller-Bridge (b. 1984) has composed the scores for many British TV series that have been shown in Finland, among them War and Peace (2016) and Vanity Fair (2018), the latest version of the film Emma (2020) and, with her sister Phoebe, the TV series Fleabag (2016–2019). Recent works include the music for Munich – The Edge of War released by Netflix at the beginning of this year. She has also composed chamber and solo music, and an opera The Bloody Chamber based on short stories by Angela Carter. Temperatures dates from November 2021 and was premiered in London with Finland’s Pekka Kuusisto conducting the London Philharmonia. It was commissioned for a series of concerts on the theme of climate change, man and nature, and, according to the concert reviews, the listener can easily imagine vast, slowly moving masses and sudden changes that create completely new landscapes. Tonight’s is the first performance in Finland of Temperatures.
