Wild Angelica (Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1889).

Notes on the Program: Northern Nostalgia 

by Julia Grella O'Connell, D.M.A., Director of Education and Community Engagement

Finland and Russia, the birthplaces of the composers on tonight’s program, have traditionally been viewed by the West as spiritual and cultural “third places.” Because of their geographical location on the Northern periphery of Europe and their long histories of invasion, occupation, and oppression, both countries, though part of the European continent, have long been thought to retain deep-rooted connections to nature and to the wisdom and spirituality of traditional folk cultures believed lost to the rational West. As such, the music of Finland and Russia serves as a palimpsest for European and American listeners: using the tools and methods of the West, its composers give voice to authentic emotional expressions that are informed by histories of hardship and a unique closeness to primordial, pre-literate ways of perceiving and knowing. The composers on tonight’s program mediate the instrumental complexity and harmonic richness of the European orchestral tradition with deep nostalgia for a past elided by modernism.

Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote “In the Beginning” in 2015 as a concert opener, and it was paradoxically the Finnish composer’s last work. Its dense, swirling instrumental textures and brooding melodies suggest an aural creation myth, sounding a sense of chaos at the beginning of time until the abrupt ending when, the composer seems to suggest, order is suddenly imposed by a divine hand. The interplay between the strings’ dark lyricism and the bright interpolations of brass, winds, and percussion is redolent of the pine forests of Rautavaara’s native Finland punctuated by rays of the sun. 

Jean Sibelius, whose influence upon his countryman Rautavaara’s work is inescapable, noted in his diary that “The name ‘symphony’ [should] be expanded in its meaning. It has always been that way. [The symphony is] an example of infinity.” In his Third Symphony, completed in 1907, Sibelius definitively shakes off the stamp of Russian music, and especially of Tchaikovsky, which informed his earlier work. The Third Symphony, among his sunniest and most optimistic, shows the composer looking instead for inspiration to Finnish folk music, with its repetitions, variations, and tonality that extends beyond Western major and minor modes. The first movement introduces a heroic, songlike theme later borrowed by Howard Shore in his film score for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – a subtle nod from Shore to the Finnish roots of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented Elvish languages. Haunting folkish melodies return in the second movement in a nostalgic, fairy tale-like minuet. Sibelius brings earlier melodic themes back in the third and final movement, rendering them in a dizzying whirl which he described as “the crystallization of chaos,” and finally bringing order to that chaos with a rousing and joyful finish.

Sergei Rachaminoff completed his Third Piano Concerto just two years after Sibelius finished his Third Symphony, and the work had its premiere in New York City with the composer at the piano. Rachmaninoff originally wrote the piece for a friend, the Polish pianist Josef Hofmann, but Hofmann found it unplayable, and indeed it has been shunned by many pianists over the past century due to its fiendish difficulty. 

Although Rachmaninoff was writing during the same period as the modernist experiments of Bartók, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, he held to the sumptuous musical romanticism of the previous decade. In a sense, the Third Piano Concerto is a self-conscious act of resistance against modernism, a rallying cry for tradition. Rachmaninoff proposed that “a composer's music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves . . . My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music." Nevertheless, he denied any specific influence on the Third Concerto from folk music, asserting that “it is borrowed neither from folk song forms nor from church services. It simply ‘wrote itself.’”

From its very beginning, however, the concerto evokes the sound and atmosphere of traditional Russian Orthodox liturgical chant with its mournful melodies, stepwise harmonic motion, and ringing call-and-response motives traded between piano and orchestra. This mood of introspection and nostalgia is augmented by the lush, cinematic sweep of the orchestra and is soon catapulted into abstraction by the brilliantly virtuosic variations in the piano, for which Rachmaninoff’s writing is at once unbelievably dazzling technically and unbearably moving emotionally. As the concerto progresses, it moves beyond melody itself and into the realm of the transcendent.

Rachmaninoff would be one of the most famous refugees of the 1917 Revolution, and came to be seen in the West as the embodiment of nostalgia in both his music and his person as the Golden Age of the Russian nineteenth century gave way to the Iron Age of Soviet rule. During his long exile in America, the composer was widely known for his love of tradition, of the sacred chant and church bells of Old Russia, at whose sound, he reminisced, “all cares, all sorrows are forgotten. The old and the young, the poor and the rich, the happy and the miserable – all are united in the same brotherly feeling of . . . hope and joy.” We hope that tonight’s concert will bring you that same hope and joy.