Classic

Helsinki City Orchestra conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste at Musiikkitalo on Wednesday, April 5. Soloist Paavali Jumppanen, piano. – Hilli, Lutosławski, Nielsen.

Great composers still remember the time when the absoluteness of music was emphasized.

Compared to that, the younger generation of composers talks openly about their influences and programmatic goals. So by Sebastian Hill (s. 1990) Peach reflects, according to the composer, a “hot summer day” and a “bright flash” that “fills the body with pleasure”.

He also describes how the work “radiates tenderness, weightlessness, sensuality and juiciness. An intimate and sensitive moment takes shape and a space where things have time to mature”.

It’s poetic, but I think the music told something completely different in this performance!

Is it even the case that the composer does human experiments and wants to test whether the listeners can hear his program text in his music, even though the music itself is the opposite in some places?

If the pizzicatos of double basses are marked to be played hard (forte), then yes Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the Helsinki City Orchestra make sure that the rhythm does not sound “gentle”.

And when the composer demands a rapid pace from one measure to another, alternately very quiet and very strong dynamics, the impression can be of a jerky snarl rather than something “intimate and sensitive”.

Of course, the nine-minute piece also has backwaters and less extreme dynamics. But my overriding impression was of tearfulness. I also heard an intermission comment, according to which the piece “very well described our broken times”.

At the same time, the work testifies to Hill’s great talent, as it is tense and vital music.

The power of music was also proven by the fact that Peach exceeded the composer’s own description of the work.

Witold Lutoslawski used his carefully controlled aleatoryness, i.e. a certain kind of randomness, also in his piano concerto in 1987.

The conductor does not conduct ad libitum parts, where everyone plays their precisely marked part “as if by themselves without coordination with others”. This was the only way the composer could get the “flexible textures” he wanted for these passages and partly random rhythms.

Perhaps more relevant is the composer’s enormous competence, the sensitivity of the sense of timbre and the combination of the modernism of the orchestral part with the pianistic tradition Chopinist to Debussy and i think too to Olivier Messiaen.

The piece feels more and more like a 20th-century piano concerto, and according to the manual Paavali Jumppanen presented it for the first time. It went well, of course. Sensitive and quiet passages were especially internalized.

The extra one was Chopin’s Lullaby, and Jumppanen performed the meditative lullaby variations maturely and tenderly. It was a good contrast to the more robust grip of the early years of the career.

If Hilli was openly programmatic and Lutosławski spoke of his piano concerto only in musical terms, Carl Nielsen was in his Fifth Symphony between these approaches.

He didn’t give the symphony an actual program, but he did talk about the differences between vague and alert forces, dreams and deeds, and passivity and activity.

It is easy to see the symphony also as a struggle between good and evil and constructive and destructive elements. The second snare drum is seen as a destructive element a bit like Dmitri Shostakovich Leningrad– in the symphony later.

Nielsen’s 1922 masterpiece falls between the world wars. Even if good wins temporarily, the seeds of new destruction can already be heard.

HKO implemented all of this for its future chief conductor Jukka-Pekka Sarasteen with chest rotting and often with a really loud volume, which Nielsen’s performance markings gave full opportunities for.

At the same time, for example, ending the first part Anna-Maija Korsimaan the clarinet solo was exemplary sensitive and soulful.

You can return to the recording of the concert behind this link.