Wake!

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.

www.susannamalkki.com

Lauri Kankkunen

Lauri Kankkunen (b. 1990) is the HPO’s I Principal Cellist, but he also finds time for solo work and chamber music in addition to his orchestral duties. In 2019, he joined Apolyptica – a Finnish band of classically-trained cellists – for its world tour taking in some 50 concerts. During his free time he enjoys things Italian: Espresso, football both on the pitch and in the stands, and friends go into ecstasies over the pizzas he has baked.

Lauri chose the cello as his instrument when he was five, because the violin was, he said, to high and the piano rattled too much. He nowadays has the pleasure of playing a late 18th-century Italian cello by an anonymous maker on loan to him from the City of Helsinki.

Ingeborg von Bronsart: Overture to Jery und Bätely

Ingeborg von Bronsart (1840–1913) was born into a Swedish-speaking Finnish family in St. Petersburg but spent her working life in Germany. The composer of operas, piano and chamber music and over 100 solo songs, she was highly renowned in her day and was also an eminent pianist. One of her many successes was the Singspiel (music interspersed with spoken dialogue) Jery und Bätely based on a comedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was premiered at the Weimar Court Theatre in 1873 and thereafter staged all over Germany.

Set in the Swiss countryside, the story tells about Bätely, who cares only about farming. She has no time for men, but nevertheless falls in love with a fellow farmer, Jery, and their happiness knows no bounds. In the overture, their love is expressed in a duet accompanied by the sweet strains of a harp.

This overture has never before been heard in Finland and has been reconstructed by HPO violinist Erkki Palola from a patchwork-like score as part of the orchestra’s project designed to update our musical heritage, to promote equality and a sustainable future.

Esa-Pekka Salonen: Cello Concerto

Esa-Pekka Salonen (b. 1958) is not only a world-famous conductor; he is also an eminent composer. His Cello Concerto of 2017 was a joint commission from the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Barbican Centre (London) and the German Elbphilharmonie and was premiered in Chicago in March 2017. The soloist was Yo-Yo Ma. In describing the first of the three movements Salonen compares the solo to a comet: “I imagined the solo cello line as a trajectory of a moving object in space being followed and emulated by other lines/instruments/moving objects. A bit like a comet’s tail,” he says. The slow second movement “starts with a wedge-formed cloud and ends with another”. The third movement begins with a slow, brooding cello solo under the residue of the second wedge-cloud. The music is often dance-like; sometimes gesticulating wildly, and at the end, the cello line climbs slowly up to a stratospherically high B-flat before vanishing.

Kimmo Hakola: WAKE!

Kimmo Hakola (b. 1958) wrote WAKE! in 2021 as his contribution to the HPO’s series of Finnish works that somehow tie in with something written by a Finnish composer pre-1945. Known already for his ability to find new perspectives on musical history, Hakola chose Sibelius’s Finlandia, the earlier version of which was called Finland Awakes. He is also interested in perceptual psychology. “I’ve tried to create music the behaviour of which is not obvious from the first moment. Things like controlling the perception of time and guiding the listener’s observations. Some might say there are game-theory structures in my composing. Perhaps, but I nevertheless want to stress that music is freedom: the perceptions and experiences of every listener are ‘right’,” he says.

WAKE! challenges the human race to wake up to a more responsible way of life and to put an end to the selfishness that is destroying human life. Together with his earlier Maro and KIMM, WAKE! constitutes a trilogy in which each part expresses concern at Earth’s future.

Jean Sibelius: Finlandia, Op. 26

In 1899, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) composed the music for a series of tableaux to be shown as part of an event held in Helsinki as a demonstration against the growing oppression and press censorship imposed by Tsarist Russia, to which Finland belonged from 1809 until 1917. The music was performed by the Orchestra of the Helsinki Philharmonic Society (predecessor of the HPO) with the composer himself conducting. Sibelius later arranged the music as a symphonic poem called Finland Awakes, and when the HPO under Robert Kajanus performed it at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1901, it was called La Patrie. A friend of Sibelius’s, Axel Carpelan, later hit on the name Finlandia. It is one of the most famous and most frequently performed pieces by Sibelius. Words (by first Wäinö Sola and later V.A. Koskenniemi) were later added to the hymn-like section, though Sibelius never intended his piece to be sung.