Anadyomene (1968) suggests a Turner canvas recast in sound. It opens restlessly among undulating pastels (the strings tend to serve as aural oarsmen throughout); the tone darkens further, and by 1'46'' the harp offers a soft spray of stardust. There are brief comments from flute and bass clarinet, the brass prompt a swelling climax, then the mood gradually becomes more animated before we are ferried back from whence we came. The original idea was to create a ‘row’ based on texts from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (a fashionable subject of study at the time) though, as Rautavaara himself explains in his entertaining note, ‘the music wrenched itself free from its serial straitjacket’ and soon took on a life of its own. A good thing too, for what we now have is ‘a homage to Aphrodite, born of the sea foam, the goddess of love’, and a very appealing one at that.
The colourful Flute Concerto Dances with the Winds is a more extrovert piece with Nielsen as a fairly certain forebear. It was composed in 1974 for the Swedish flautist Gunilla von Bahr and shares its material between ordinary flute, bass flute, alto flute and piccolo. The action-packed opening movement withstands some fairly aggressive interjections from the brass, though by 3'43'' the string writing has taken on a modal quality reminiscent of Vaughan Williams. The brief second movement recalls the shrill sound world of fifes and drums; the elegiac Andante moderato offers plenty of jam for the alto flute, and the finale’s striking mood-swings have just a hint of Bernsteinian exuberance about them.
I was fortunate enough to have attended the world premiere in Helsinki of On the Last Frontier (1997) last autumn and the CD confirms favourable first impressions. Rautavaara’s prompt was an early encounter with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe. He calls it ‘a seafaring yarn in the typical boys’ reading mould’ and responds accordingly with a 24-minute slice of descriptive musical reportage, not of Poe’s exact ‘narrative’, but of an imagined Last Frontier based on ideas from the story’s closing section. On the Last Frontier is an eventful, majestic, slow-burning tone-poem, nourished further by some distinctive instrumental solos and with telling use of a full-blown chorus. No texts are provided, and yet the aura of unexplored maritime depths and a sense of mystery associated with them carry their own wordless narrative. As with Ondine’s other Rautavaara CDs, this particular production is expertly performed and exceptionally well recorded.'