Camilla Nylund, one of our most successful opera singers, is also one of the brightest stars among international sopranos. The full-bodied glow of late romance fills the concert hall as Nylund, Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra join forces with Richard Strauss. Death and Transfiguration, composed as a young man, and The Four Last Songs, composed fifty years later, and that look at death calmly, the ending life made complete by death.
Sampo Haapamäki's scale has long had 24 notes. Quarter-tones can also be heard in the world premiere of his commissioned Helsinki Variations piece, which is inspired by a chord in a concerto composed by Aarre Merikanto in the 1920s.
Susanna Mälkki
Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra since 2016 and Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2017, Susanna Mälkki is a regular guest with the world’s most illustrious orchestras and at such opera houses as La Scala, the New York Metropolitan and the Vienna State Opera. From 2006 to 2013 she was Artistic Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris on the invitation of Pierre Boulez and has conducted the premieres of works by many of the greatest contemporary composers. Beginning her career as a cellist and winning the Turku Cello Competition in 1994, she spent three years as principal cello in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Susanna Mälkki is a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in France, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London and a member of the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien in Stockholm.
Camilla Nylund
Camilla Nylund is one of the most highly-in-demand Finnish opera singers in the world today, having already sung this year alone in Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and in Die tote Stadt in Dresden. Over the years, she has appeared at literally all the leading operatic and concert venues. To honour her long and successful artistic relationship with the Vienna State Opera, she was awarded the title of Austrian Kammersängerin in 2019, and the Semperoper Dresden has appointed her Saxon Kammersängerin.
Camilla Nylund has a special affection for the music of Richard Strauss and made her ultimate breakthrough as Salome in 2004. She made her New York Metropolitan debut in 2019 as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, and has just sung the same role in Berlin. The Four Last Songs hold pride of place in her repertoire and she has, among others, sung them with the Berlin Philharmonic, at La Scala, Milan and at the Vienna Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Sampo Haapamäki: Historia
Winner of many accolades, most recently the Nordic Prize for Music (2020), Sampo Haapamäki (b. 1979) is one of Finland’s leading contemporary composers. A salient feature of his music is his use of quarter-tones, meaning that he divides the octave into 24 tones instead of the traditional 12. His brand-new Historia is therefore a chance for the listener to plunge into the whirlpool of microtonal music.
Historia is the most recent addition to the Helsinki Variations series commissioned by the HPO. One of the conditions of this series is that the variation must allude to a Finnish piece of music composed before 1945. Haapamäki’s gaze fell upon a 12-tone chord in the Schott Concerto composed by Aarre Merikanto (1893—1958) in 1924 and thought to be the first in which such a chord was heard in Finnish music. Historia also makes reference to other classics: over 80 in all. Lasting 15 minutes, it consists of seven ‘Lapsus’, i.e. slips, lapses or errors, separated by at most a short break. The piece is, says Haapamäki, a case of parodic intertextuality, aiming at a sort of self-reflection, examining history from ‘outside the box’. In the process, each ‘lapsus’ generates novel variations. Just as we always perceive history from our own time perspective, Historia addresses the concept of time both now and past.
Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs, Death and Transfiguration
Richard Strauss was the last in the line of great German Romantic Lied composers. He regarded the soprano voice as the ideal vehicle for human expression, and his beloved wife Pauline de Ahna was luckily a soprano. He was 84 years old and nearing the end of his life when he composed his Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder) in 1948. All Europe lay in ruins, and a whole culture had perished. How could music be part of a culture that could bring about such mass destruction? The only way he could come to terms with this was by composing a bittersweet setting of poems by Hesse and Eichendorff. While the younger generation of composers was disassociating itself from the lost world by striking out in a new direction, Strauss looked back almost 60 years, to the mood of his own Death and Transfiguration.
The Four Last Songs are melodically homogeneous and the orchestration is light and gentle. Frühling (Spring), September and Beim Schlafengehen (When Falling Asleep) to words by Hesse are still optimistic, but Eichendorff’s Im Abendrot (At Sunset) openly asks “Ist dies etwa der Tod” (Is this perhaps death?). At the climax Strauss quotes a motif from his own Death and Transfiguration.
The songs are the tender leave-taking of a composer resigned to death. As a young man, he had suffered from a life-threatening illness and “composed himself” out of his mortal fear by accepting the finiteness of life. In 1889, he composed the orchestral poem Death and Transfiguration. A violinist friend of his (Alexander Ritter) wrote a poem describing the “events” which Strauss later appended to the score. The music is in four main episodes performed without a break. The first is a gloomy, slow one in which a sick man lying on his death bed engages in a desperate fight with Death. His slumbers do not bring him peace. The second describes the struggle between his desire for life and Death’s cold embrace. The events of his life pass before his eyes, from childhood to adulthood, but there is still something in life he wishes to achieve. But in the final episode he realises that he cannot win the fight against Death. This realisation or ‘transfiguration’ is expressed in the majestic theme and chorale with which the work ends. The sick man accepts his fate, is ‘transfigured’, and his soul finds peace.
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