Double Concerto

Osmo Vänskä

Now one of the most celebrated Finnish conductors, Osmo Vänskä (b. 1953) began his career as a clarinettist. He first made a name for himself as a conductor on winning the Besançon Competition for young conductors in 1982. Six years later, he took over at the helm of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, a tenure he would hold for over 20 years and during which he raised the orchestra to international renown. After chief conductorships with the Iceland and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras, he began a Music Directorship of the Minnesota Orchestra that ends this year.

Of tonight’s programme he says, “I feel a great affinity with Russian music, and I always particularly like conducting Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Kabalevsky’s Comedians is great circus music and fun to play, and I have for a long time been hoping to reinstate Prokofiev’s seventh in the concert repertoire.” Vänskä became well acquainted with the works of Kalevi Aho during his term with the Lahti SO, which appointed Aho its Composer-in-Residence in 1992. “Kalevi never lets his performer have an easy time, but it’s worth the hard work, because the music is so good.”

Niamh McKenna

Niamh McKenna is a German-Irish flautist who has been living in Finland since 2014. The country and its music had, however, been familiar to her long before this, and even as a child she had enjoyed reading about Lapland. She never dreamt when she played Sibelius’s second symphony and Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus in the German Youth Orchestra that she would one day be principal flautist in the Helsinki Philharmonic. Until now, her experience of Aho was only as a member of the orchestra; she had studied his Flute Concerto as a student, but tonight’s appearance is her Aho debut as a soloist.

“The flute and the harp are age-old instruments,” she says, “and feature large in many cultures. They have been playing together the world over, at least in ancient Greece and in Irish folk music. As partners they are more common in chamber music, but rare in front of an orchestra. The music in Aho’s concerto reflects the instruments’ archaic nature, and he engages them in dialogue both with each other and with the orchestra. “

Emmanuel Ceysson

In addition to a busy recital and solo schedule that has taken him to Carnegie Hall, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Wigmore Hall and orchestras across Europe, French harpist Emmanuel Ceysson (b. 1984) has been visiting professor at the Sibelius Academy since 2019. He was Principal Harp with the New York Metropolitan Orchestra from 2015 and has been Harpist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since autumn 2020, having previously won a host of competitions: gold Medallist at the 2004 USA international Harp Competition, first prize at the New York Young Concert Artists Auditions in 2006, and first prize at the 2009 ARD competition in Munich. He makes his solo debut with the HPO tonight in a work that occupies a very special place in his career.

Ceysson began playing the harp when he was seven, after hearing Mozart’s concerto for the flute and harp and deciding that the harp was what he wanted to play. He has already released 13 CD albums, one of the most highly-acclaimed being the Mozart double concerto with flautist Philippe Bernold in 2016. Ceysson has previously appeared in Finland with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra.

Dmitri Kabalevsky: The Comedians

Obliged, like Sergei Prokofiev, to heed the Soviet party line, Dmitri Kabalevsky (1904–1987) wrote music that is on the whole straightforward and readily accessible to the ordinary listener; it does not seek to spearhead the contemporary avant-garde. The orchestral suite The Comedians (1940) is his arrangement of the score he had composed a year or so before for a children’s play called The Inventor and the Comedians by the Soviet writer Mark Daniel. The inventor in question is Johannes Gutenberg, father of the printing press, and the comedians are a band of travelling buffoons. The suite’s ten movements are short dances and most are very fast. Prokofiev recalled in his memoirs that there was in the 1930s Soviet Union a great demand for music for children, his own contribution being Peter and the Wolf. The two works even have things in common: the March in The Comedians includes a direct quotation from Peter and the Wolf. Then again, the ever-popular Galop is a clear nod in the direction of Shostakovich.

Kalevi Aho: Concerto for Flute and Harp

The Concerto for Flute and Harp by Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) was to have been premiered in Belgium, but Covid had other ideas. Luckily the HPO was able to come to the rescue as one of the commissioners and has a flautist, Niamh McKenna, with a burning desire to perform it.

If anyone is a concerto composer it is Kalevi Aho, who already has 37 under his belt. Most have been composed since 2000; before that, he was known above all for his numerous symphonies. His attention to the concerto has been a cumulative process, as more and more instrumentalists have asked him to write one for them. Some of the instruments are quite rare, and each concerto is without exception a large-scale, ambitious work of art.

Lasting a good half hour, the Concerto for Flute and Harp dates from 2020. It is in four movements, which points more to a symphony in that the traditional concerto has only three, and it is by nature symphonic. Since neither of the solo instruments is a loud one, the orchestral texture is for the most part fairly thin, though it can at times be quite noisy, too, especially in the two middle movements.

Sergei Prokofiev: Symphony No. 7

Being denounced by Stalin as a “formalist” in 1948 meant catastrophe for Sergei Prokofiev. If he wanted his great masterpieces to be performed, he would have to rewrite them to bring them in line with ‘socialist realism’. It is against this background that his seventh symphony should be heard, at least if the listener wonders what has happened to the earlier, provocative, controversial Prokofiev. Much of it was written in hospital in 1952, not long after he had suffered a blow to his head from which he never really recovered, and barely a year before his death.

The opening movement immediately sets the tone of the symphony – a style somewhere in between Neoclassicism and Romanticism – yet Prokofiev succeeds in picking out colours from a palette slightly simpler than before. Though not as weighty as his fifth symphony, the seventh is a fine example of his outstanding craftsmanship. The playful Scherzando is evocative of the background music to old newsreels but nevertheless serves the symphony as a whole. The singing slow movement is a wonderful contrast to the surrounding movements, for the finale begins at a gallop, ending in a hymn-like melody that truly lifts the whole symphony off the ground.