Lotta Wennäkoski grew up in the Finland of Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho, absorbing something of the latter’s feeling for distinctive colours and textures and the former’s way with orchestral gesture and panache. But Wennäkoski’s interest in the progressive engineering of large-scale concert works has resulted in music about far more than beguiling beauty for its own sake, while her personal beliefs and energetic proactivism make her an artist to be reckoned with.

Wennäkoski was born in Helsinki but has been shaped as much by other European nations as by Finland. At the age of 19 she travelled south to master violin technique at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest, where the curriculum included the obligatory study of Hungarian folk music. Later, in 1994, she enrolled on the composition course at the Sibelius Academy back home where her teachers included Saariaho, Eero Hämeenniemi and Paavo Heininen. During her time there, she also travelled to the Netherlands to study with Louis Andriessen (1998-99).

The folk music Wennäkoski encountered in Budapest stuck with her, coming to shape her own work in the long term, but in the immediate term helping to fix her feet firmly on terra firma – in senses both musical and societal. On returning to Finland, she played Hungarian folk tunes as a busker on the streets of Helsinki and allowed that music, and its vital impetus, to inform her work as a musician at children’s daycare centres and after-school groups in the city. ‘I belong to a generation of composers who see the outside world as an opportunity, rather than a threat,’ she has said.

Wennäkoski’s work to date may demonstrate a broad and liberated outlook but it does so while suggesting that established traditions and outlets are those that fascinate and stimulate her most. It was the flute concerto Soie (2009) that brought her attention and adumbrated her chief musical interests, among them concerto form and the continued exploration of the colouristic and textural capabilities of the acoustic symphony orchestra.

Soie, Wennäkoski told me in a 2015 interview, was ‘the first piece where I had the feeling I could really do what I wanted’. She continued: ‘I had been looking to be clear in my writing for so long and in this piece I somehow succeeded in that.’ Clarity and comprehension, she went on to explain, are key objectives.

Soie is first and foremost a beguiling exploration of texture, colour, light and density. Its three movements are inspired by textiles of different textures and states (‘Voile’ – ‘sail’ or ‘veil’; ‘Lin gros’ – ‘coarse linen’; and ‘Soie’ – ‘silk’) and reveal their inspiration with almost spartan control and uncanny acuity. Winds of many strengths and characters appear to blow through the soloist’s instrument, but Wennäkoski avoids any sense of the aimless noodling that composers are often drawn into when writing for the flute, instead establishing a particular sort of lyricism built on the idea of cumulative melodic shape. Clarity is key, manifest in the crisp, clean air the concerto appears to breathe.

Many of the same principles inform the contemporaneous song-cycle Le miroir courbe (2010-11) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, setting poetry by Yves Bonnefoy (it’s not yet recorded commercially, but there’s a fine 2013 performance on YouTube sung by Virpi Räisänen with Tapiola Sinfonietta conducted by Nils Schweckendiek). Like a coiled spring, the score’s tense yet exquisite broken lyricism harbours huge latent power – a characteristic this piece has in common with much of the composer’s music from the ensuing decade.

Concerto form was tugging more and more at Wennäkoski at this time, perhaps following the stimulus of Soie and its success. Her succumbing to the bait has resulted in some of her most admirable and enjoyable works. She worked collaboratively with guitarist Petri Kumela on the concerto Susurrus (2016). Its title is an onomatopoeic one, a Latin word referring to rasping, whining, whooshing, rattling and scraping sounds – many of which are provided by Wennäkoski’s orchestra in service of yet another extraordinarily subtle and varied palette (the most obvious example of ‘scraping’ comes from the plastic ruler with which the soloist extracts a twanging sound from the instrument’s strings).

As a concerto for large orchestra but a low-resonance solo instrument, Susurrus set challenges for Wennäkoski that she approached holistically in the context of concerto form and its opportunities. The soloist is effectively embedded within the orchestra, their grooving rhythms spreading out virally while the orchestra gives the illusion of playing far more emphatically – and with far more pitch content – than it actually is.

A similarly configured work that followed, the harp concerto Sigla (2021-22), took some of these ideas forward. The harp, said Wennäkoski at the time of writing the piece, has its own problems when it comes to resonance but can do far more than we think: ‘It can growl, whizz and rattle.’ It does those things in the concerto. Far more important, however, is the work’s serious response to the thrown gauntlet of concerto form. Here the harp is the motor that brings the orchestra to life, suggestively feeding it not just particular timbres and colours but also rhythms in what is an intense and absorbing rhythmic conversation. We know we’ll hear distinctive colours from Wennäkoski, so it’s thrilling to taste, again, what she can do with structure – how she can explore musical relationships by taking one structural idea a long way. The work’s title, by the way, has multiple meanings in many languages; in Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines, these include ‘vivacity’ and ‘enthusiasm’.

Sigla was first performed by harpist Sivan Magen in May 2022, at the end of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s season-long celebration of Wennaköski’s music. His subsequent recording of the work under the orchestra’s chief conductor Nicholas Collon won 2023’s Gramophone Award in the Contemporary category. The recording opens with a performance of Flounce, Wennäkoski’s primary-coloured orchestral jamboree written in 2017 for that year’s Last Night of the Proms.

Also included on the recording is Sedecim (2015-16), a three-part orchestral work marking the centenary of the Sibelius Academy Symphony Orchestra in 2016, each of its three movements inspired by artworks or events dating from a century earlier. Again, the work proves that structural integrity lays the best foundations for exploratory music, from the regimented fantasies of its opening movement (a response to Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Södergran’s poem ‘Violetta skymningar’ – ‘Violet Twilight’, published in 1916), to the earthy moan commemorating the Battle of Verdun, to the finale, spun off the slow movement of Melartin’s Symphony No 5, premiered in 1916. ‘I feel so alive now, I have to tell myself to cycle in the streets more slowly,’ Wennäkoski told me while at work on the piece. Something of that certainly shows.

The composer’s obvious relish when faced with the myriad opportunities of orchestral resonance has not prevented her from delivering fine work elsewhere. In 2022 there was the first performance of her new work for the Danish Quartet, Pige (‘Girl’) at Carnegie Hall, New York. For all her working inside tradition, there are examples of her distorting it (the work Jong, 2012-13, for orchestra and onstage juggler, earned her a second nomination for the Nordic Council Music Prize) and railing against it (the monodrama Lelele, composed in 2010, echoed its predecessor the song-cycle N! – Love and Life of a Woman, 2002-03, in underlining pertinent political issues surrounding the place and treatment of women). Those two stage works will undoubtedly feed into her recently completed full-scale opera, Regine, telling the story of Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s fiancée Regine Olsen to a libretto by Laura Voipio – and soon to have its premiere at Finland’s Savonlinna Opera Festival.

Recommended Recordings

Amor omnia (suite). Hava. Soie

Kersten McCall fl Finnish RSO / Dima Slobodeniouk

Ondine (A/15)

Essential Wennäkoski here, starting with the concerto that announced her mature style, Soie, and the 2014 suite from Amor omnia – the score she wrote in 2011-12 to retrofit Konrad Tallroth’s 1922 tragic-romantic silent film of the same name.

Flounce. Sedecim. Sigla

Sivan Magen hp Finnish RSO / Nicholas Collon

Ondine (4/23)

Winner of the 2023 Contemporary Gramophone Award, this needs little introduction. The centrepiece is Sigla, a consistently beguiling harp concerto in which the composer addresses big technical questions with beauteousness and personality. There’s lots to listen out for in Sedecim, while the performance of Flounce reveals hidden depths in the score.

‘Culla d’aria’

Eija Räisänen, Tanja Kauppinen-Savijoki, Riikka Rantanen vocs Avanti! / Pietari Inkinen, Tuomas Ollila-Hannikainen

Alba

This 2008 release is a good snapshot of Wennäkoski’s chamber works, including her playful love letter to Hungary and its folk music, My Nostalgia (2006-07), and the 12 movements of her song-cycle N! – Love and Life of a Woman, designed to be performed with Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -Leben but here heard alone. The title-track, Culla d’aria (2003-04), is a poetic and delicate string quartet seasoned with extended techniques.

This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today