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10 JanuaryFrIDay SErIES 8Helsinki Music Centre at 19.00

Hannu Lintu, conductorAlice Sara Ott, piano

Magnus Lindberg: Era (fp in Finland) 18 min

Felix Mendelssohn: Piano Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25 18 min

I Molto allegro con fuoco II Andante III Presto – Molto allegro e vivace

INTERVAL 20 min

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 6 in D minor, Op. 104 30 min

I Allegro molto moderato II Allegretto moderato III Poco vivace IV Allegro molto

Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 105 (in 1 movement) 21 min

Adagio – Un pochettino meno adagio – Vivacissimo – Adagio – Allegro molto moderato – Allegro moderato – Vivace – Presto – Adagio – Largamente molto – Affettuoso

Interval at about 19.45. The concert ends at about 21.05.Broadcast live on yle radio 1 and the Internet (yle.fi/klassinen).

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The LaTE-nIGHT CHaMBEr MuSIC will begin in the main Concert Hall after an interval of about 10 minutes. Those attending are asked to take (unnumbered) seats in the stalls.

Magnus Lindberg, piano

Magnus Lindberg: Jubilees 15 min

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MaGnuS LInDBErG (B. 1958): Era

Magnus Lindberg composed Era, now to be heard for the first time in Finland, as a commission to celebra-te the 125th anniversary of the royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The world premiere was conducted last January by David robertson. also on the program-me for that night’s concert were three works all a century old: Berg’s Altenberg Lieder, Zemlinsky’s Maeterlinck Songs and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Lindberg says of the work’s cha-racteristically pithy title: “Though my creative personality and early works were formed from the music of Zimmermann and Xenakis, and a cer-tain anarchy related to rock music of that period, I eventually realised that everything goes back to the founda-tions of Schönberg and Stravinsky – how could music ever have taken anot-her road? I see my music now as a synthesis of these elements, combined with what I learned from Grisey and the spectralists, and I detect from Kraft to my latest pieces the same underlying tastes and sense of drama.

“In Era I have built the piece from a powerful underpinning in the bass re-gister.--- I was thinking particularly of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony and the way the music evolves from the bass line, rising from low to high register. --- There is a single tempo throughout but, as with other pieces like Al largo, a relatively fast tempo in the foreground is related to a much slower underlying pace. This allows a strong monolithic

build-up which should be suited to the Concertgebouw and its cathedral-like resonance, creating a strong dramatic impression overall.”

The Dutch and British reviews likened Lindberg’s treatment to that of richard Strauss and Scriabin, and if we think of the tension between these two very different composers, we may catch a hint of the depth of Lindberg’s expres-sion in Era. and like Berg, Schönberg, Stravinsky and Sibelius, these two were truly in their prime exactly a hundred years ago, in the enchanting early days of modern music.

FELIX MEnDELSSOHn (1809–1847): PIanO COnCErTO nO. 1 In G MInOr

Felix Mendelssohn composed three piano concertos, the first when he was only 12. That in G minor dates from 1831, by which time he had become a keyboard virtuoso of 22 greatly in need of a solo number of his own composi-tion to play on his concert tours. In a letter home he wrote that he was wor-king feverishly on a new piece, and he appears to have done so at an excep-tional pace. He composed most of it in Italy, together with the first version of his Italian Symphony.

The quick outer movements are in many senses a veritable showcase of early romantic keyboard virtuosity. The solo part – brilliant yet infinitely fluent – sits unusually well under the hands of a dexterous pianist, yet at the

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same time it tends to draw on the de-vices developed by Mozart, Beethoven, Weber and Hummel rather than laun-ching anything new. The young compo-ser seems to have observed the models of his predecessors while remaining in thrall to his own nimble fingers.

Mendelssohn wastes no time at all in this concerto. It is a recognised fact that his tempos are always faster than average, and in this concerto, too, the listener is left breathless by the opening attack. For the first-movement Allegro of concertos of that era is usually more moderate. Mendelssohn leaps into the fray without any cautious intro-duction. This is in line with the form of the whole concerto, which has less of Mozart and Beethoven and more of the “Konzertstück” favoured by Weber and Spohr. as a result, the whole con-certo takes only about 18 minutes to perform. a restrained trumpet fanfare leads without more ado from the fairly slight first movement to a slow, idyllic Andante in E flat major that could at first almost be by Chopin but later evo-kes associations with Mendelssohn’s own Songs Without Words. a fanfare also heralds in the rollicking finale in G major. The tempo is even more furious than at the start of the concerto, and not even the brief flashback to the se-rene second theme of the first move-ment is sufficient to check the unbrid-led flow.

JEan SIBELIuS (1865–1957): SyMPHOny nO. 6

His publisher was all for trashing Sibelius’s proposal to compose a se-cond “lyrical” Violin Concerto, and what is more in the same key, D minor. Discouraged by this reaction, Sibelius abandoned his plan and instead used some of the material for what later be-came his Sixth Symphony (1923).

The concerto element is not the only odd thing in the symphony’s genesis. The position of the Sixth in the set of Sibelius symphonies is interesting to say the least: spiritually, it is most clearly akin to the Seventh (they even have consecutive numbers), but as Erik Tawaststjerna pointed out, the Sixth is, genetically, related far more closely to the Fifth – which is radically different in character!

The quality most often noted in the symphony is its modality, referring to the dominance of modes (archaic ways of ordering the notes in a scale) in the tonal structure. Sibelius claimed that modes came to him more natu-rally than they did to most of his con-temporaries because his roots lay in the Eastern component of Finnish folk music. The melodies of poetry such as that in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, are widely modal, and the Dorian mode, especially, is claimed to be particularly “Finnish”. It was also Sibelius’s favourite mode, colouring the works of his nationalist period just as much as such later ones as the Violin Concerto (the beginning) and the

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Fourth Symphony (the cello solo). That it would occupy a sovereign position in his Sixth Symphony went without saying, and although Sibelius had fully adopted his pan-European, non-natio-nalist style by the time he wrote this Symphony, it is still described as his “most Finnish” one.

“The shadows grow longer” is a ph-rase often quoted in connection with Sibelius Six. While I well understand this expression, I would like to stress that this most sensitive, explicit and enigmatic of the Sibelius Symphonies is not all shadow, for it also projects a landscape bathed in sunlight.

JEan SIBELIuS: (1865–1957): SyMPHOny nO. 7

If the Sixth was a Symphony with a Finnish take on the modal soundsca-pe of the renaissance and a Classicist ideal, the Seventh adopts an ancient Hellenic perspective. The reason for this interpretation was supplied by Sibelius himself in describing the sun-ny central Allegro as a “Hellenic rondo”.

In structure, the Symphony is equal-ly unique, being cast in a single move-ment. Sibelius is known to have long been entertaining dreams of a one-movement Symphony. He nearly made them come true in his Fifth, but lucki-ly he soon made the right decision to set aside his plan for a one-move-ment “symphonic fantasia” for the time being. Fantasia sinfonica was indeed the title of the Seventh Symphony

at its premiere and a few subsequent performances. The idea of calling his work a Symphony had evidently pas-sed through his mind some time be-fore, but discouraged by the prevailing critical climate, he was not yet quite bold enough to put it into practice. For some, the Zeitgeist brought confiden-ce, for others the fear that the very con-cept “symphony” was an anachronism. This threat must have greatly unsettled Sibelius, a composer whose reputation rested so strongly on the genre.

The premiere in Stockholm on March 24, 1924 was conducted by Sibelius himself. His misbehaviour at the con-cert in Gothenburg the previous year, high on champagne, had so trauma-tised his wife, aino, that she no longer accompanied him on his concert tours. Her refusal sobered him to such an ex-tent that he gradually gave up conduc-ting, first at home in Finland and later elsewhere. The fact that the tremor in his hand was getting increasingly wor-se did not, of course, help matters. He finished the Symphony only a couple of weeks before the first performance, and since he was the only person with a copy of the score and refused to tra-vel by plane, little time was left for re-hearsal and the performance must in many respects have left something to be desired. Even so, it was a great suc-cess, and despite its avant-garde struc-tural features, the Seventh has never been shunned in the way the Fourth has. This, surely, just goes to prove that so long as a piece of music is easy on the ear, the audience will usually accept any anomalies without more ado.

Jouni Kaipainen (abridged)

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an InTErVIEW WITH Hannu LInTu

Hannu Lintu, what is it about the music of Magnus Lindberg that appeals to you?

It’s the musicianly approach: the com-bination of pragmatism and vision that is so rewarding for the performer. Magnus’s music also has features with which I personally, as a musician, feel a keen affinity: great, dramatic masses and colourful, varied surface structu-res. you have to build both a good, firm base and a lively surface.

Orchestras like playing Lindberg and the FrSO knows his music like the back of its own hand. The right way to ap-proach a work always becomes clear at the first rehearsal, and nothing needs explaining. Everything just evolves as you play.

It’s good to hear Mendelssohn’s G minor Concerto in the same concert. Because am I right in thinking that Mendelssohn still has a reputation for being something of a superficial composer?

Mendelssohn’s not considered very pro-found, that’s true. His reputation has not always benefited from the fact that composing was easy for him even as a child. He composed his Octet when he was a teenager, and at about the time of this Concerto he was in his twen-ties. The orchestration of this Piano Concerto and the first Symphonies is indeed sometimes a little clumsy, as re-gards the use of woodwinds and tim-pani, but the melodic inspiration is unique, and in tonight’s concert this

child-like, romantic world is mirrored against Finnish music of the present day.

The lack of depth should not be taken as a problem, because that’s how music was at that time. The gre-at emotions of the full romantic era were only just coming in, even though Beethoven had already touched the border. Composers like Mendelssohn and Weber did not see the upheavals taking place in Europe or the revised concept of culture as a particularly gre-at artistic challenge. They kept cheer-fully chirping along amid the ruins of the old rococo Europe.

For us Finns, this style is possibly the most alien part of the German repertoi-re. To our minds, German music must always be profound, serious and noisy. Of course we happily thump out our Beethoven, and then Brahms, but the-se Mendelssohns, Webers and Spohrs too often go unplayed.

You are conducting both the Sixth and the Seventh Sibelius Symphonies at this concert. Why two Sibelius works, and how do they stand in relation to each other?

Sibelius created a new world in each of his Symphonies. Though he conti-nued logically developing his sympho-nic tools in all of them, they differ gre-atly in character. Often, what interests me more is the contrast between them than their continuity. The Sibelius Symphonies are not part of a sympho-nic continuum in quite the same way as those of Beethoven or Brahms.

It’s nowadays the custom to play the-se two Symphonies one after the other, with no break or applause. But for me,

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the worlds of the Sixth and Seventh differ so greatly that I need a little mental pause between them. and the harp and bass clarinet need a chance to leave the platform.

Then again, I often have the fee-ling that something is till wanting af-ter the Sixth Symphony. To me, there could be nothing more beautiful than to end with the Sixth, but it often lea-ves me with the feeling that somehow something’s left hanging in the air. The Seventh has lots of profound, st-rong shades, whereas the Sixth glides along very lightly and ultimately vanis-hes into thin air. So you have to choose what state of mind you want your au-dience to go home in.

These Symphonies were going round in Sibelius’s head at more or less the same time, but they differ greatly in character and form. The Sixth in prin-ciple has a classical four-movement structure, but its movements are more like character pieces than parts of a coherent symphonic entity. Its world is very similar to the music of The Tempest: it has a similar transparency. When I’m conducting the Sixth, I often have the feeling I’m conducting not a Symphony but a vast cavalcade of fleeting moments or dreams. Whereas the form of the Seventh is so crystal-lised that everyone can sense its sturdy structure.

Lotta Emanuelsson

aLICE Sara OTT

Twenty-five year old German-Japanese pianist alice Sara Ott has, in less than five years, established herself as one of the most exciting musical ta-lents of today. recent concerts have seen her perform with the Munich Philharmonic in Munich and the nHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, both under Lorin Maazel, and on a very successful European tour with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Krzysztof urbański. She has also been heard in recital in London, Chicago, new york, Hamburg and Berlin.

Highlights of the 2013/14 sea-son include appearances with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Washington’s national Symphony Orchestra, and tours with the FrSO, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre Philharmonique de radio France.

recordings by alice Sara Ott for Deutsche Grammophon, including music by Liszt, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, have won numerous awards and distinctions.

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THE FInnISH raDIO SyMPHOny OrCHESTra

The Finnish radio Symphony Orchestra (FrSO) is the orchestra of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (yle). Its missi-on is to produce and promote Finnish musical culture and its Chief Conductor as of autumn 2013 is Hannu Lintu.

The radio Orchestra of ten players founded in 1927 grew to symphony or-chestra strength in the 1960s. Its previo-us Chief Conductors have been Toivo Haapanen, nils-Eric Fougstedt, Paavo Berglund, Okko Kamu, Leif Segerstam, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo. The FrSO has two Honorary Conductors: Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo.

The latest contemporary music is a major item in the repertoire of the FrSO, which each year premieres a number of yle commissions. another of the orchestra’s tasks is to record all Finnish orchestral music for the yle ar-chive. During the 2013/2014 season it will premiere six Finnish works commis-sioned by yle.

The FrSO has recorded works by Eötvös, nielsen, Hakola, Lindberg, Saariaho, Sallinen, Kaipainen, Kokkonen and others, and the debut disc of the opera aslak Hetta by armas Launis. Its discs have reaped some major distinc-tions, such as the BBC Music Magazine award and the académie Charles Cros award. The disc of the Sibelius and Lindberg violin concertos (Sony BMG) with Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist recei-ved the MIDEM Classical award in 2008,

in which year the new york Times chose the other Lindberg disc as its record of the year.

The FrSO regularly tours to all parts of the world. During the 2013/2014 sea-son it will be visiting Central Europe un-der the baton of Hannu Lintu.

all the FrSO concerts both in Finland and abroad are broadcast, usually live, on yle radio 1. They can also be heard and watched with excellent stream qua-lity on yle.fi/klassinen.