Fanfares

 

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

An artist of exceptional versatility and breadth, and renowned for his objective approach, Jukka-Pekka Saraste has established himself as one of the outstanding conductors of today, demonstrating remarkable musical depth and integrity.

He has served as Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne from 2010 until 2019. Previous positions include Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as Principal Conductor of both the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Guest engagements have led him to the major orchestras worldwide. Most recently, he created the LEAD! Foundation, which offers a leadership/mentorship programme for young conductors and soloists. 

His extensive discography, including the complete symphonies of Sibelius, Nielsen and Beethoven has received much critical acclaim. He has been awarded the Pro Finlandia Prize, the Sibelius Medal, and the Finnish State Prize for Music. 

Jukka-Pekka Saraste shares a long history with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra – he made his debut with the orchestra in 1983 – and will in future be engaging in even closer partnership. In 2023, the HPO will be led by an artistic team comprising Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Co-director Pekka Kuusisto, and Composer-in-Residence Anna Clyne.

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Christian Tetzlaff

Despite dazzling audiences and critics alike with his astounding virtuosity and tone and his vast command of the standard repertoire, Christian Tetzlaff (b. 1966) has never had any desire to bask in glory. The most important thing is, he says, the music and playing with others. Having performed his solo piece, he therefore may well join the ranks of the orchestra for the remains of the concert, as he did when the HPO performed Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht in 2011. He recorded the Dvořák concerto with the HPO and John Storgårds in 2016.

Tetzlaff favours modern violins. In 2002, he gave up his Strad and has since played instruments made by Stefan-Peter Greiner. “In every single well-done test made in recent years, player and listeners cannot make a distinction between a great old instrument and a great new one,” he says. “Stradivari and Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ were fantastic violin makers, but their instruments are not good because they are old and Italian, but because they are well built – and this is something that somebody nowadays can also do.”

 

Antonín Dvořák: Violin Concerto

As the 19th century progressed, Antonín Dvořák became the most celebrated composer of his native Bohemia. He is remembered particularly for his late symphonies (the best known of which is the 9th, “From the New World”, inspired by the couple of years he spent in America) and his radiant B-minor cello concerto. In his hands, Czech folk music merged with late Romanticism in a National-Romantic blend simply bursting with melodies each more beautiful than the last and rollicking rhythms.

Dvořák was five when he first took up the violin and as a student earned his living playing the violin and viola in orchestras in Prague. He was in fact better known at first as a violinist than as a composer. It is therefore rather a pity that he wrote only one violin concerto. This masterpiece dates from summer 1879. Johannes Brahms was at the time a great champion of his music and succeeded in arousing the interest of many musicians and conductors. At one stage he even helped Dvořák financially, and it was through Brahms that Dvořák made the acquaintance of the most famous violinist of the 19th century, the Hungarian Joseph Joachim. It is to Joachim that Dvořák dedicated his concerto in A minor. He sought Joachim’s critical opinion and received many suggestions. Since Joachim represented the cutting edge of contemporary violin technique, Dvořák was happy to incorporate his ideas. Strangely, Joachim never actually performed the concerto in public, and the soloist at the premiere in Prague in 1883 was František Ondricek.

The first and second movements are performed without a break. The melodic and rhythmic motifs of the third movement in rondo form are borrowed from folk music, the rhythm in triple metre from the Bohemian furiant dance and that in duple metre the dumka of Hungarian origin. In keeping with late-19th-century practice, the concerto has no great solo cadenza; instead, the solo violin is constantly in the lead and has ample opportunity for displays of technical brilliance.

 

Leoš Janáček: Sinfonietta

Not until late in life did Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854– 1928) received the recognition he deserved – when the National Theatre in Prague agreed, after much persuasion, to stage his opera Jenůfa. By that time Janáček was 62 years old. All of a sudden his music was in demand, and from then onwards he composed more than at any other stage in his career. One of the works was the Sinfonietta. Others included four operas, of which The Cunning Little Vixen, Kát’a Kabanová and The Makropulos Affair are still frequently performed.

The Sinfonietta of 1926 composed in a mere three weeks is the orchestral work by Janáček most often played. He was 72 years old when he wrote it, yet it has all the passion and enthusiasm of a young man. Maybe the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman, Kamilla Stösslová, 38 years his junior had something to do with this. True, she did not return his love in any way and appears to have felt harassed by his letters. Structurally, only few of his compositions are, however, so strictly disciplined as the Sinfonietta.

The spark that ignited the Sinfonietta was a brass band concert Janáček heard in Písek. Seeing the trumpeters stand up for their solos aroused in him the idea of a fanfare-like beginning. The Sinfonietta is slightly unusual in that it has five movements. It is a real feast for the brass. The first movement is dedicated to brass and timpani, and there are reminders of the opening fanfare in the second movement, too. According to a programme note penned by Janáček himself, the third, calmer movement describes the Queen’s Monastery in Brno. The fourth movement is more in the nature of a scherzo, and at the end of the fifth, the extra brass instruments repeat the fanfare motif.