Finnish composer Sallinen
benefits from the copious production of CPO - almost as much
of an industry dynamo in its release programme as Naxos.
Sallinen's alternation
of motivic cells is something of a hallmark. It is both economic
in style and engrossingly satisfying for the listener.
This
cellular construction and willingness
to repeat cells - of which there are
many - is apparent in the Fourth
Symphony. The first movement's cells
have the determined jaw-set of Prokofiev's
Sixth Symphony. This is blended with
the horological activity of Shostakovich's
Fifteenth. The quiet desolation of the
Russian composer is touched on by the
lyrical and tense central movement entitled
Dona Nobis Pacem. I should mention
that Sallinen was born in a village
to the north of Leningrad looking on to Lake Ladoga in Karelia which at the time of Sallinen's
birth was part of the Soviet
Union. The movement's tension is
turned to foreboding by a dully hollow
side-drum tattoo that plays through
its central pages. Bells and percussion
play a significant part in Sallinen's
music. He reminds us here of Malcolm
Arnold's most desolate scores in the
finale. A creeping chiming mixes with
pecked-out music for the flutes and
strings, increasingly stabbing units
of notes and a rising to urgent fortissimo
topped by antiphonal brass. Mad little
birdsong units chug and chatter away.
They are carried by woodwind and strings.
The rhythmic activity of this movement
links to the spasmodic bursts of the
first movement. There is the occasional
echo of Malcolm Arnold in the haunted
music of his symphonies 5 and 7 and
Cornish Dances. One can also make out,
in the occasional explosions of yawning
brass and bells, the sound of Alan Hovhaness
in his tumultuously baleful climaxes
in the Vishnu symphony.
The Second Symphony
is in a single movement. While Perti Pekkanen conducted
the Turku premiere
of the Fourth Symphony it was Okko Kamu who premiered the Second
in Norrköping with the percussionist Rainer Kuisma. Kamu has
been a valiant pioneer for Sallinen. It was his Bis LP and later
CD that fired the starting pistol for the launching of Sallinen's
symphonies 1 and 3 into the world in 1977. Sombre quiet fanfares
and drippingly repetitive dewdrop figures can be heard from
the orchestra while the percussionist tickles the ear with rhythmic
cells of activity. The percussion array includes marimba, vibraphone,
crotales, tom-toms, bongos, Chinese temple blocks and gongs,
military drum, side drum, suspended cymbal and large tam-tam.
The composer is at pains to emphasise that this is not intended
to major on the virtuosity of the writing, on display, rather
to convey symphonic weight. I am not convinced by the symphonic
aspirations of the piece and wonder if the prominent part for
percussion is an obstacle to that grand aim. For me the work
lacks the momentum, continuity and concentration of Sallinen's
flanking symphonies.
The Horn Concerto
is subtitled Bells and Arias. It is classic Sallinen
material with its frank lyric qualities, especially in the central
movement, completely liberated by the decade's acceptance of
melodic material. The horn sings autumnally as well as rasping
and abrading in Britten style fanfares. Everything is presented
with a lucidity that is unafraid to reveal the work’s wonderfully
engaging building blocks.
Finally we come to
the work first recorded by a young Paavo Berglund for Decca
back in the sixties. It is Mauermusik or Wall
Music written in Köln in 1962. It is to the memory of the
young East German who was shot to death for attempting to cross
the Berlin Wall into the West. The work was premiered in 1964,
not by Berglund, but by Ulf Soderblom in Helsinki. Written before Sallinen
fully found his own voice and amid a dominant atonal conformity,
this is a moving and desolate piece that, in its string writing
recalls, the Penderecki of the 1960s. The cellular sequencing
is still there and you can hear the anger and anguish. This
is not however the Sallinen we know but a young composer paying
his dues to the norms of the time.
Recording and production
values are excellent. In fact the annotation is better than
usual. It is at the hands of Martin Anderson and defeats CPO's
tendency to opt for the congealed academic dissertation style
an effect exacerbated by translation into English. The recording
quality is open, vital and lively.
This is the third disc in CPO's valuable
Sallinen Edition - see previous reviews of Symphonies
1 and 7; 8.
Rob Barnett
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