Hannu Lintu, conductor Juha Uusitalo, baritone Uuno Klami: Laulu Kuujärvestä (Song of Lake Kuujärvi) 16 min Bohuslav Martinu : Pamatnik Lidicim (Memorial to Lidice) 9 min INTERVAL 20 MIN Gustav Mahler: Der Tamboursg sell (The Little Drummer Boy) 6 min Gustav Mahler: Der Schildwache Nachtlied 6 min (The Sentry s Night Song) Paul Hindemith: Mathis der Maler 26 min I Engelkonzert (Concert of Angels) (Ruhig bewegt) II Grablegung (Entombment) (Sehr langsam) III Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (The Temptation of St Anthony) (Sehr langsam, frei im Zeitmass Sehr lebhaft) Interval at about 7.35 pm. The concert ends at about 8.40 pm. Broadcast live on YLE Radio 1 and the Internet (www.yle.fi/rso). The concert will be televised and broadcast on YLE Teema Kausikortti in spring 2010. 1
Uuno Klami (1900 1961): Song of Lake Kuujärvi (1956) Yrjö Jylhä (1903-1956) is mainly remembered in Finland for one particular type of poetry. His great opus magnum was Kiirastuli (1941), a collection based on and processing Finland s experience of its Winter War (1939-40) with the Soviet Union, and even in later years neither the man nor the artist ever broke free from thoughts of war. Though the war was virtually still raging as Jylhä wrote his poems, he nevertheless succeeded in giving them a highly humane feel. Klami, by contrast, needed a temporal distance in order to come to terms with the war. The overture Suomenlinna (1940/44) composed in the shadow of the war is still battle music dazzled by heroic patriotic visions such as befitted a nation at war, but the note of defiance later faded. By the time Klami began his setting of Kuujärvi from Jylhä s collection entitled Poems (1943) more than a decade later, his attitude to war and its expression in music had completely changed. The Song of Lake Kuujärvi was composed in 1956 for a competition arranged by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and won third prize. It is Klami s only large-scale work for solo voice, an epic for baritone and orchestra about men caught up in war and their desire to find greater substance and meaning in life. Klami s Song begins to a steady marching beat. A soldier recalls tramping the roads round Aunus (Olonets), the heat and exhaustion of battle, when all at once a magical view unfolds: Kuujärvi (literally Moon Lake ) in all its beauty. In the soldier s mind it is transformed into an idyllic haven and his thoughts turn away from the war. Klami s music is quick to react, without exaggerating, to the weary soldier s vision. But the vision is but an empty dream, for the fellow soldier with whom he extolled the wonders of Kuu järvi fell in the very next battle. Bohuslav Martinu (1890 1959): Pamatnik Lidicim (Memorial to Lidice) (1943) In May 1942 Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most notorious leaders of the Nazi regime, was attacked by members of the Czech resistance in Prague. He was seriously injured, and not even the specialist doctors flown in by Himmler were able to save his life. Heydrich known by the Allies as the blonde beast and by his enemies as Hangman Heydrich died in Prague on June 4. Heydrich s death sparked off a wave of Nazi retribution. In Berlin and Prague, more than a thousand members (either real or suspected) of the resistance were put to death. The retaliation reached its tragic climax in the little Czech mining village of Lidice on June 10. The villagers were groundlessly accused of taking part in Heydrich s assassination; all the men of 16 or over were shot, the women and children were sent to concentration camps and the village was razed to the ground. Finally its very name was erased from German maps. News of Lidice spread around the world and reached the ears of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, who had settled in the United States for the duration of the war. Reeling from the shock, he reacted as any artist: in art. In only a few days in August 1943 he composed an orchestral elegy in memory of the Lidice tragedy. The premiere was in New York in October of that year. Memorial to Lidice is one of the best-known and most moving of all Martinů s many works, and one packed with powerful musical symbolism. It contains a quotation near the beginning of a medieval Bohemian chorale, the words of which St Wenceslas, don t let us die have 2
served the Czechs for centuries as a protest against oppression. At the final climax the Memorial quotes the famous opening fate motif from Beethoven s fifth Symphony. This motif was used by the Allies during the war as a symbol of victory. Beethoven s Symphony is in itself already victorious in spirit, but the fate motif three short notes and a long also happens to be Morse code for the letter V, the first letter of the word Victory. There is also a spark of hope in the final bars of Martinů s work, which ends in a clear, serene C major. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Der Tamboursg sell (THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY) (1901) & Der Schildwache Nachtlied (THE SENTRY'S NIGht SONG) (1892) In early 1887 Gustav Mahler happened to come across a collection of German folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy s Magic Horn). He was already familiar with a few of the poems in it but was now particularly smitten. Over the next year and a half he set to music 24 poems from the collection over half his songs, in fact. He scored his earliest Wunderhorn songs for voice and piano, but from 1892 onwards the piano was replaced by an orchestra. He also used some of his Wunderhorn songs in his second, third and fourth Symphonies. The thing that appealed to Mahler most in the Wunderhorn poems was their authentic folk quality. He saw beyond their deceptive simplicity and made their sentiments part of his original musical worldview embracing sharply contrasting moods. The songs in which he casts a penetrating eye on the life of the soldier constitute a touching, characteristic group of their own. His musical lexicon of signals, march rhythms and drum beats here gives depth and sharpness to the many anguished emotions expressed in the poems. Der Tamboursg sell was to be Mahler s last Wunderhorn song. It is a bitter funeral march with a heavy tread that accompanies the army s young drummer boy to the gallows as he takes his leave of life. In Der Schildwache Nachtlied Mahler allows dream and reality to collide headon. The sentry s words alternate with the calm replies of the girl of his dreams. Thus the young sentry standing guard at night lets his thoughts run free amid the harshness of war, and it appears from his final words that his dreaming turns out to be fatal. Paul Hindemith (1895-1963): Mathis der Maler (1934) The leading character in the opera Mathis der Maler by Paul Hindemith is the great German Renaissance painter Matthias (Mathis) Grünewald. The events are set in the German peasants uprising of the 1520s. The main tensions are religious conflicts and the confrontations between peasants and nobles. This was a highly explosive topic in 1930s Germany and one further underlined by such details as the burning of books in act three. Hindemith completed his opera in 1935. It could not possibly be staged in Germany, so the premiere was held in Zurich in 1938. While Hindemith was already working on Mathis in 1933, he received a commission from Wilhelm Furtwängler for the Berlin Philharmonic. For this he decided to use some of the thematic material from the opera on which he was working and gave its three movements titles alluding to the opera and to Grünewald s paintings: Engelkonzert (Concert of Angels) Grablegung (Entombment) and Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (The Temptation of St Anthony). These paintings are in Grünewald s best-known work, the Isenheim Altarpiece now in Colmar, France, which he finishes in the last act of the opera. 3
The Symphony completed in early 1934 and premiered in March with Furtwängler conducting in Berlin won great audience and critical acclaim and a little later Hindemith conducted its recording for the German Telefunken label. But before the year was over, the wind had turned and the composer began to come under attack. In December 1934 Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, denounced Hindemith as an atonal noise-maker, a cultural Bolshevist and a spiritual non-aryan. That the attack on Hindemith began after the Symphony is ironical, for the Symphony marked a shift in his music in a more tonal, traditional direction, and the well-balanced counterpoint exudes a respect for tradition. The opening Concert of Angels is the overture to the opera. The slow second movement, Entombment, is also taken straight from the opera, where it is an interlude before the final scene. The biggest, most complex and most dynamic movement in the Symphony is The Temptation of St Anthony crafted from music from the second half of the opera. Kimmo Korhonen (abridged) Hannu Lintu Lintu has conducted not only the leading orchestras in his native Finland but also the Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt and Stuttgart Radio Orchestras, the Sydney and Melbourne Symphonies, the Royal Liverpool and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the New Zealand Symphony and the Lausanne and Scottish Chamber Orchestras. His term as Chief Conductor of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra 1998-2001 was followed by a three-year appointment as Artistic Director of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra 2002-05, and in August 2009 he began as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra. He also works with the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra and was Artistic Director of its Summer Sounds festival in 2005. After studying the piano and cello at the Turku Conservatory and later the Sibelius Academy, Lintu entered the conducting classes of Jorma Panula, Eri Klas and Ilya Musin. He later attended masterclasses with, among others, Myung Whun Chung in Siena. He won the Nordic Conducting Competition in Bergen in 1994 and graduated from the Sibelius Academy in 1996. Juha Uusitalo Born in Finland, Uusitalo played the flute in top Finnish orchestras before embarking on a career as a singer. He made his Finnish National Opera debut in 1997 and was a regular member of its solo ensemble 2000-08. His international breakthrough came with a performance as the Wanderer in the production of Wagner s Siegfried conducted by Gustav Kuhn at the Tirol Festival in 1999. The leading European opera houses became increasingly aware of him after he was invited to sing in Wagner s Rheingold and Götterdämmerung at the Bavarian State Opera with Zubin Mehta conducting. Most of all Juha Uusitalo has sung Wagner s Dutchman at all the world s greatest opera venues. This season Uusitalo sings Wotan in the new Ring cycle at the Vienna State Opera and he already has many engagements to sing in Wagner operas for years to come, particularly the greatest Wagner bass-baritone roles, such as Wotan and the Wanderer in The Ring, the title role in The Flying Dutchman and Amfortas in Parsifal. Uusitalo can also be heard at the New York Metropolitan, the Vienna and Berlin State Operas and the Savonlinna Opera Festival. His schedule for spring 2010 includes his Covent Gar- 4
den debut as Scarpia in Tosca and the title role in The Flying Dutchman at the New York Metropolitan. Also in demand as a concert soloist and Lied singer, Uusitalo regularly works with the world s most celebrated conductors. The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FRSO), the orchestra of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), celebrated its 80th anniversary in autumn 2007. Its Chief Conductor is Sakari Oramo, who assumed the post in 2003 after nine years as its conductor. The Radio Orchestra of ten players founded in 1927 grew to a full-size symphony orchestra in the 1960s. Its chief conductors have been Toivo Haapanen, Nils-Eric Fougstedt, Paavo Berglund, Okko Kamu, Leif Segerstam and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Contemporary music is a major item in the repertoire of the FRSO, which each year premieres a number of YLE commissions. All in all the FRSO has so far premiered more than 500 works. Its programme for the 2009/10 season features six world and many Finnish premieres. The FRSO recordings now number over 100, on the Ondine and other labels. One historic gem is the Andante festivo conducted by the composer, Jean Sibelius, at the Helsinki Conservatory (now the Sibelius Academy) Hall. This recording is the only known document of Sibelius in the role of conductor. With Sakari Oramo the FRSO has recorded music by Bartók, Hakola, Lindberg, Kaipainen, Kokkonen and others, and the debut disc of the opera Aslak Hetta by Armas Launis. Its discs have won many prestigious distinctions, such as Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine awards. Its most recent honour, a MIDEM Classical Award, was for the recording of the Lindberg and Sibelius Violin Concertos with Lisa Batiashvili as the soloist in 2008. Another recording of Lindberg s orchestral pieces was selected as the record of the year 2008 by the New York Times. The FRSO has been on major tours all over the world and given nearly 300 concerts abroad. It has visited Japan four times. During the 2009/10 season it will be visiting St. Petersburg, Benin, and Stockholm. All the FRSO concerts, both in Finland and abroad, can be heard on the FRSO s home channel, YLE Radio 1. They are usually broadcasted live and can also be heard worldwide via the Internet (www.yle.fi/rso). 5