Mustonen and the MSO bring the chill of the north to bear on an April night in Melbourne.

Melbourne Recital Centre

April 5, 2014

Tapiola, written in 1926, was the opening piece and namesake of MSO’s first orchestral outing in the Metropolis Festival Series. The first of three programs devised by guest conductor and composer Olli Mustonen, it well and truly defined the evening’s theme: contemporary retellings of ancient stories using the Finnish master’s harmonic language.

Tapiola was Sibelius’ last major orchestral work before he rendered himself compositionally mute. He lived for another thirty years, alive but musically silent. The opening strings felt too hesitant in the immediate acoustic of the Melbourne Recital Centre, but that was only momentary – soon the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra found their feet with a rich, golden, tutti sound.

The score for the work is headed with an inscription:

Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
With them dwell the Forest’s mighty god,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.

Sibelius’ expansive harmonic texture wove the gloomy magic secrets. The piece traverses a constant, looming darkness with creeping textural changes, as the audience passes green forests and traipses unwittingly into a Nordic storm. The brass was excellently balanced for Sibelius’ idiosyncratic harmonic effects, the submerged harmonies hiding under the skin of the skittish woodwind that presages the forthcoming blizzard.

The Sibelius connection became clearer with the second piece, as Sibelius served as a champion for the young Rautavaara. His Violin Concerto featured Australian soloist Kristian Winther, whose energy and ferocity was well utilised in this performance. Unlike other concerti, the violin soloist in Rautavaara’s work doesn’t present melodic themes to be considered, replicated or transfigured by the orchestra. Instead they seem to be a consistent conduit for the emotional direction of the work, sitting on a harmonic knife-edge and nagging the orchestra to remember their presence.

After an opening demonstration of leading, insistent double-stopping, the orchestra falls silent, the violinist falling forward in a virtuosic technical display, not unlike a testing etude. The oboe arrived to lead us to a 'moonlit landscape’, before another silence from the orchestra, where we arrive at the soloist’s cadenza. Rautavaara specifically requests the soloist to write his own cadenza, and Winther’s frenzied display grew organically from his interpretation, playing what could have been an agile or aggressive transfiguration of an Irish jig. The last ‘movement’, written in New York, captured the restlessness of a city that never sleeps.

Andrew Aronowicz’s Strange Alchemy was the first work after the interval and is one of the winners of this year's MSO Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers Program. The annual program selects four young composers who participate in a range of workshops and a final performance, after which two compositions are selected to be included in the MSO Metropolis series. Aronowicz took to the stage before the unveiling of his world premiere, and spoke about the origins of his composition.

The piece is an auditory realization of the metamorphosis of matter between gas, liquid and solid. A slowly bowed cymbal breaks the opening silence, and in becomes the representation of the gas, interspersed by droplets of melody from muted brass. A highlight was the delicate marching celesta, underscoring the flickering melodic material now taken over by the chamber-sized string section. Occasionally the full ensemble surged to their full dynamic range, but eventually the music slipped away as mysteriously as it began.

The last work in the program, was conductor Olli Mustonen’s own Symphony No 1, “Tuuri”. Written for baritone soloist and orchestra, the text is taken from a well-known poem by nationalist poet, Eino Leino. Leino also happened to be a distant relative of Mustonen, and a close friend of Sibelius, so it was fitting that Mustonen has borrowed heavily from Sibelius's tonal pallet to create a sound world that is undeniably Finnish. The work tells the tale of Tuuri, who has built a beautiful new home, and celebrates with a lavish dinner party. In the middle of the party, Death comes to claim him and Tuuri begs for his life, asking for a little more time on earth. Eventually he has to accept his journey to the underworld.

The baritone Juha Kotilainen was also the soloist for the original premiere and proved a wonderful narrator, with a clean, crisp and powerful voice that easily punctuated the orchestra, even when it was in full flight. Mustonen’s deathly sleighbells were eerily reminiscent of Mahler’s, and Sibelius’s ghost was felt very clearly when the winter storm arrived.

While it was an excellent evening of music, it certainly wasn’t what I expected from an orchestral program as a part of a new music festival. While the program was intelligently crafted as a stand-alone concert, the exciting and challenging ideas evidenced in the contemporary writing were perhaps overshadowed by the legacy of the harmonic language of Sibelius. To the ears of a modern audience, Sibelius no longer feels like a contemporary voice.

Limelight subscriptions start from $4 per month, with savings of up to 50% when you subscribe for longer.