RAUTAVAARA Lost Landscapes: Works For Violin and Orchestra (Simone Lamsma)

Record and Artist Details

Genre:

Orchestral

Label: Ondine

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 58

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: ODE1405-2

ODE1405-2. RAUTAVAARA Lost Landscapes: Works For Violin and Orchestra (Simone Lamsma)

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Fantasia Einojuhani Rautavaara, Composer
Malmö Symphony Orchestra
Robert Trevino, Conductor
Simone Lamsma, Violin
In the Beginning Einojuhani Rautavaara, Composer
Malmö Symphony Orchestra
Robert Trevino, Conductor
2 Serenades for Violin & Orchestra Einojuhani Rautavaara, Composer
Malmö Symphony Orchestra
Robert Trevino, Conductor
Simone Lamsma, Violin
Lost Landscapes Einojuhani Rautavaara, Composer
Malmö Symphony Orchestra
Robert Trevino, Conductor
Simone Lamsma, Violin

Here we have ‘late-period Rautavaara’ – music written after the composer’s aortic dissection of 2004 and the extensive convalescence that followed. It is marked out, according to Kimmo Korhonen’s generous booklet note, by a sense of serenity and distillation from a composer who had glimpsed death and had nothing left to prove. Taken together, the works here form a ‘grand farewell’.

That’s one way of reading it. Another is that post-2004 Rautavaara simply isn’t as good as much of the music that came before. In the Beginning (2015), the composer’s last completed piece, is an overture-like work that is no match for Isle of Bliss. Like In the Beginning, the Fantasia for violin and orchestra written in 2015 for Anne Akiko Meyers can’t quite work out how to end itself and so simply shrugs its shoulders and stops. This is Rautavaara in soft, neo-Romantic vein, his unmistakable harmonies glimpsed fleetingly. It noodles on its chosen modes like a bored organist waiting for a late bride.

There is a little more to the Two Serenades, written for Hilary Hahn (and completed by Kalevi Aho, as it lay unfinished when Rautavaara died) and recorded by her recently (DG, 3/21). The weave of the violin line clearly endears the piece to violinists. There are some codified references hidden underneath the nostalgia and even an attractive sense of patience and stasis in places, a relief after the uniform movement heard thus far. There is more soul in these works, and soloist Simone Lamsma responds in kind.

Lost Landscapes is an orchestration from 2015 of Rautavaara’s 2005 work of the same name for violin and piano. It charts places of significance for the composer, from Vienna to New York, but the music hardly differs in expression or construction; Rautavaara’s vision of New York sounds rather like his own picture of Vienna, just faster. There is some beauty here, but plenty to lull listeners into slumber. And there’s far more to Rautavaara’s oeuvre than that.

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