Songs of Meena

Osmo Vänskä

Osmo Vänskä (b. 1953) played sub-principal clarinet in the HPO before going on to become one of the most celebrated Finnish conductors both at home and abroad. For 20 years – from 1988 to 2008 – he was Chief Conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra (and now its Conductor Laureate), raising it to world fame with its tours and recordings, and followed this with 19 years at the helm of the Minnesota Orchestra. His term as Music Director of the Seoul Philharmonic ends next year.

Tonight’s programme of Finnish music carries a few echoes of his own history: he recorded the Kokkonen symphony with the Lahti band, likewise In memoriam, which he often conducts abroad. The opening number is, he says, a fantastic find: “We recorded Raitio’s Swans in Lahti in 1992 and I’ve been trying to get it on concert programmes ever since. There aren’t many works I feel I simply must do again. Luckily I now have a chance with the HPO. It’s brilliant music and will undoubtedly come as a surprise to anyone not yet familiar with it.”

Tuuli Takala

Tuuli Takala first hit public awareness in 2013, on winning the Timo Mustakallio Singing Competition and astounding critics and audiences alike as The Queen of the Night in the Finnish National Opera production of The Magic Flute. Engagements since then have taken her to many of the major European opera houses, and she has been a soloist at the Semperoper in Dresden since 2015. She last appeared with the HPO in its 2015 performance of Mozart’s Requiem.

Tuuli has been collaborating with Olli Kortekangas since 2018 and has been closely involved in the Songs of Meena from the very beginning. “Olli suggested a song cycle to poems by Meena Alexander,” she says. “I had a look at them and we finally picked out six. For me, it was particularly interesting getting to know the poems before the music, and to see how Olli had interpreted them. Olli always composes on the text’s and the content’s terms. It’s wonderfully singable and melodic music, and in places temperamental with its coloratura figures.”

Väinö Raitio: The Swans

Väinö Raitio (1891–1945) was one of the first Finnish Modernists and a prolific composer, but the time was not right for his great works of the 1920s and they did not receive the recognition they deserved. A decade later he reverted to a National-Romantic idiom that again won neither critical nor audience acclaim. The work by him most often performed, and the only one published during his lifetime, is The Swans (1919). It falls midway between the two stylistic eras in that the topic and melodies nod in the direction of the Late Romanticism of Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov but the orchestral timbres look strictly towards the early Modernism of, say, Scriabin. The Swans loosely alludes to a poem by Otto Manninen (1905) painting a majestic scene in the late-summer morning sunshine as the mysterious birds glide across the water-lily-strewn lake, calmly take flight and head for the horizon.

Olli Kortekangas: Songs of Meena

Olli Kortekangas (b. 1955) is best known for his vocal music and large-scale works for the stage. Songs of Meena (2020) is his second orchestral song cycle and he composed it specifically for lyric soprano Tuuli Takala. The songs are settings of texts by Meena Alexander (1951–2018), an Americanised poet of Indian descent Kortekangas discovered while seeking inspiration for his Migrations for mezzo-soprano, male choir and orchestra. He was immediately struck by the poems, their starkness and sensitivity, but also their cosmopolitan tone. “They are full of contrasts, such as familiar and alien, arriving and departing, here and there. The narrator is always on the move. The poems nevertheless speak not of getting lost but of seeking the new. I wanted to create a world of its own for each of the songs, yet so that they all hang together. The musical references engage in dialogue with the text, but between the lines rather than repeating what has already been said.”

Joonas Kokkonen: Symphony No. 4

Joonas Kokkonen (1921–1996) was one of the greatest figures on the Finnish musical scene in the 1950s to 1980s. Critic, holder of the honorary title Academician, Chairman of many influential musical organisations and Professor at the Sibelius Academy, he is remembered above all as the composer of his opera The Last Temptations that sparked off a great new era and boom in the history of Finnish opera.

Kokkonen wrote his fourth and last symphony four years before the opera and it differed from its predecessors, which had featured dodecaphony and other Modernist techniques. This one is softer and looked ahead to post-Romantic tone painting and the style that ultimately made The Last Temptations a people’s opera. The fourth is his most popular symphony and many would say his best. It is a logical, tightly-compressed package in only three movements (the other symphonies had four) in which everything depends on and influences everything else.

Jean Sibelius: In memoriam

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) composed In memoriam (1909/1910) in the aftermath of Finland’s most shocking political murder: in June 1904, Eugen Schauman had shot Russian Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov and then himself. Sibelius and his friends were overjoyed, for Finland was at the time desperately striving to break free from Imperial Russia. Tekla Hultin, a journalist, recorded in her diary for New Year’s Day 1905 that Sibelius was already setting to work on a Requiem for Schauman. Over the next few years, he nevertheless suffered from severe ill health and had to reduce his plans for a “monumental Requiem” to a funeral march lasting under 10 minutes that no longer necessarily had anything to do with the murder. In memoriam does not sound particularly Sibelian. Rather, the lush string writing is more evocative of the grotesque funereal moods of Mahler’s first and fifth symphonies, while the melodies call to mind the funeral march in Beethoven’s Eroica or the Wagnerian pathos of Götterdämmerung.