Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Autumn Gardens”: A Radiant Orchestral Soundscape

by

Autumn is a season of shimmering, radiant colors. Long shadows fall amid fading sunlight and a crisp chill seeps into the air. All of this can be felt in Autumn Gardens, a vibrant orchestral soundscape in three movements, written in 1999 by the Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016). The title refers to a passage from the libretto of Rautavaara’s 1990 chamber opera, The House of the Sun, “…like a butterfly in the garden of black …

Read more

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “A Tapestry of Life”: Four Atmospheric Snapshots

by

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 2007 orchestral tone poem, A Tapestry of Life, is set in four movements which feel like cinematic snapshots. Each movement inhabits a distinctly atmospheric world in which a vast, shimmering soundscape opens in front of us. The music unfolds in time, but it also gives us the same serene, floating sensation we might get looking out of the window of an airplane at the gradually-shifting view. Dreamlike associations with words and poetic …

Read more

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s First Piano Concerto: Twentieth Century Finnish Neo-Romanticism

by

At moments, you can hear the ghost of Jean Sibelius emerge in Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto No. 1, completed in 1969. Rautavaara (1928-2016) was among the most significant Finnish composers to follow Sibelius. His style evolved gradually, moving from 12-tone serial modernism into Neo-Romanticism. His later works, such as the 1994 Seventh Symphony (Angel of Light), embrace a tantalizing mysticism. In his 2016 remembrance, the composer Kalevi Aho (a student of Rautavaara) writes, Einojuhani …

Read more

New Release: Anne Akiko Meyers’ “Fantasia”

by

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers’ newly-released album, Fantasia, opens with a beautiful, shimmering Scandinavian soundscape. Written in 2015, the Fantasia for violin and orchestra is one of the final works of Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016). In his early days a composer of 12-tone music, Rautavaara is best known for the mystical neo-romanticism of later pieces such as Cantus Arcticus (“Concerto for Birds and Orchestra”) and Symphony No. 7, “Angel of Light. Meyers talks about her commission of the fifteen-minute-long elegy and her …

Read more