Rautavaara Cantus Arcticus, Op.61

Elgar Cello Concerto in E minor, Op.85

Sibelius Symphony No.2 in D, Op.43

Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, always well worth hearing in its own right, also served as a distinctive opening to this concert, an opening which influenced one’s perception of the two works heard later in the evening.

In 1955 it was no less than Sibelius who recommended the award to Rautavaara (born in 1928) of a scholarship which enabled him to study at the Julliard (with Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions), so there was a real aptness in his work opening a programme which closed with Sibelius. The Cantus Arcticus, which rightly holds a place of some honour in the now considerable corpus of works for live musicians and pre-recorded tape, was composed in 1972 after earlier flirtations with neoclassicism and serialism. By the time of Cantus Arcticus Rautavaara’s work was often characterised by a kind of eclectic employment of many musical styles and elements, varying from work to work. The tape of bird songs which Rautavaara himself prepared and used was recorded in three locations – around Oulu (it was for the University of Oulu that the work was written), around the arctic circle and in the marshlands of Liminka – and the natural sounds, as manipulated by Rautavaara  powerfully evoke a certain kind of landscape. As such the sounds have the power to stir some deeply rooted memories, not just those of individuals familiar with the particular places, but those deep in the human psyche, of the sort explored in, for example, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. When, for instance, at the beginning of the second movement (‘Melankolia’) Rautavaara lowers in pitch (by a couple of octaves) the song of the shore lark it becomes not a documentary record but a kind of ghostly after-image of human intervention in the natural world. What Cantus Arcticus does as we listen to it – present us with the interplay of the human and the ‘natural’ – is also what it is about. In the first movement the woodwinds and the muted brass imitate some of the phrases from the spring songs of the marshland birds we hear on tape; but in such passages Rautavaara also implicitly inverts the idea of imitation, making us consider the very real sense in which most human music (and instruments) are rooted in the copying of natural sounds and sound-sources.   In this performance the balancing of relative volumes between the recorded and the live was well judged and in the spacious acoustic of the Brangwyn Hall the music repeatedly made one think in terms of space rather than time. Jac van Steen’s reading of the music very attractively combined attention both to the pointillist clusters and to the longer, more continuous lines of Rautavaara’s music. The result was a satisfying, richly evocative performance.

Mirroring Cantus Arcticus, closing the concert as Rautavaara’s composition opened it, was the second symphony of Sibelius. There is still a tendency to interpret this symphony as predominantly nationalist in its intentions, as a kind of ‘Liberation’ music, expressive of Finnish desires for an escape from Russian political control and for the assertion of Finnish cultural identity in the face of Swedish influences. It has always seemed to me that though such matters may, to a degree, be implicit in the score, to foreground them excessively is to undersell the symphony. It is worth remembering that the symphony was first conceived while Sibelius was in Italy early in 1901. Landscape matters in this music, as much as it does in the Cantus Arcticus, and the landscape of the first movement is decidedly pastoral, with more than a hint of Mediterranean warmth and light, an attractive radiance. That first movement is, necessarily, the point of musical departure, just as Sibelius and his family returned from Italy to Finland later in 1901. In the disturbing andante, by turns turbulent and bleakly austere, there is a suggestion that the journey was not necessarily an artistically fruitful one, that the northern landscape was less immediately inspiring or, at any rate, that it seemed to lend itself less naturally to translation into symphonic language. Van Steen’s interpretation of both movements was impressive, tightly controlled without being merely pedantic. Here and later, the brass of the BBC National Orchestra played with restrained, unflamboyant power and in the scherzo the strings coped very well with Sibelius’s intensely energetic writing. In the trio the echoes of the first movement suggest a passing yearning for its very different ‘landscape’, before a full commitment to the Nordic is accepted and then developed. In the allegro moderato finale which follows directly on from the third movement, the ‘north’ is not merely accepted. Its particular qualities, the virtues of its own ‘landscape’ are elected, endorsed and celebrated, as having a value different from, but equal to, the ‘classical’. Van Steen’s was a very lucid reading, so that the multi-directional voices in the closing pages were all heard, all given equal space in the landscape, as it were. The quasi-hymnal intonations of the conclusion stirringly effect an affirmation of the arrival ‘home’, in far more than a merely literal (or political) sense.  Jac van Steen seemed very much at home in this music; it would be good to hear him conduct more Sibelius.

In between these two Nordic works we heard a performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto, with Paul Watkins as soloist. The Cello Concerto was the last of Elgar’s significant compositions. The work was written in the cottage amongst woods near Fittleworth in Sussex, in which the Elgars lived from 1917 to 1919. There is much in the music that might suggest the fall of light through leaves, the “chequered shade” of Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, although there is not much of the dancing that goes on in that chequered shade in Milton’s poem. There is, for all kinds of reasons both personal and national, a markedly elegiac, autumnal feel to much of the music. Paul Watkins is a fine cellist, both as a soloist and a contributor to chamber music and, as his activities as a conductor have further demonstrated, a musician of considerable range and insight. One wouldn’t expect him to give a poor performance of anything he played and certainly he didn’t on this occasion. And yet this was a performance which somehow didn’t quite compel, at least not consistently. The B flat melody of the Adagio communicated real passion, but some of the other movements seemed just a little underpowered, emotionally speaking. Watkins’s playing didn’t perhaps have the sheer tonal variety necessary to do full justice to the music and van Steen’s conducting had a slight air of the mildly routine about it. This felt like music making of very high competence, music making that was very worthwhile and enjoyable rather than truly memorable. In that sense, the performance of his piece didn’t quite reach the heights achieved in the two Finnish works which framed it.

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