The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Can music express nationality? Not for the first time this question arose recently, when listening to a collection of ‘Overtures from Finland’ performed by the Oulu Sinfonia under the ever-enterprising Rumon Gamba (Chandos). For most listeners, Finnish music begins and ends with one figure: Jean Sibelius. Yet, even setting aside the many excellent contemporary composers who emerged since the post-war period – among them, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Kaija Saariaho, Kalevi Aho and Magnus Lindberg – Finland has never been short of musical talent. This much was evident from a release we reviewed in December 2021 of ‘Scenes from the Kalevala’ (Finland’s national epic) which, aside from Sibelius’s Lemminkainen in Tuonela, demonstrated a wide variety of musical styles and approaches in music by Leevi Madetoja, Uuno Klami and Tauno Pylkkänen, from Madetoja’s heady late Romanticism to the altogether more modernist colours (tinged with a Sibelian aftertaste) of Klami’s Kalevala Suite.

‘Overtures from Finland’ demonstrates an even wider variety of approaches. This is partly down to the fact that it covers more composers: nine in total, again including Sibelius (the Karelia Overture of 1893). Yet anyone anticipating the broad, open vistas hinted at by the cover artwork is in for a shock. This is down to the variety of subject matter, which strays far from the expected timeless national myths, instead visiting the worlds of Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty (Palmgren and Melartin, respectively), as well as the carefree world of the Comedy Overture (Madetoja) – a genre popular across Europe in the years after the Great War – and the distinctly Gallic influence discernible in Klami’s Cobblers on the Heath (1936). Earlier stylistic influences encompass both German and Russian Romanticism (Finland only won full independence from Russia in post-Revolution 1917).

An important caveat here is that, in this varied collection of works, few of the composers are trying to express their own nationality: they are simply writing music (mostly illustrative) on a wide range of subject matters. It’s rather like taking ten assorted British composers from the first half of the 20th century and expecting them all to express ‘Britishness’ (whatever that means) when in fact they are all trying to achieve very different ends. Nevertheless, figures like Elgar and Vaughan Williams in British (or at least English) music and Sibelius in Finnish cast long shadows, shaping the expectations of audiences as well as musicians themselves.

Yet even Sibelius himself is a composer of many faces, from the early, Tchaikovskian influence palpable in the First Symphony, via the distinctly up-front nationalism of Finlandia and the triumphal bombast of the Second Symphony’s finale, to the more hard-won triumphs of the middle-period symphonies and the brilliant, expansive scene-painting of the contemporaneous tone poems, to the gaunt textures and elemental power of the late works: the Sixth Symphony, the single-movement Seventh, and his final masterpiece before the long self-imposed silence, Tapiola. Certainly some of the earlier works express aspiring nationhood, but for works that capture the essence not so much of the nation as of the land itself (and the myths that it has engendered across the centuries) one must look to the music of the middle and later periods.

Undoubtedly the iconography of Sibelius recordings has played a part in his association with the Finnish landscape (a limitless supply of swans flying across bleak, flat winterscapes!). But the way in which he crafted his music – the unique slow-burn of his ostinatos, the spatial elements highlighted by his scoring particularly of the lower instruments, and the very gradual unfolding of the harmonies, coloured by sustained dissonances – very deliberately evokes the stark northern landscapes, the long summer days and endless winter nights, and the larger-than-life figures of the national myths and legends.

There are many ways in which music can reflect and even depict nationality – in overt tub-thumping nationalism, but also in a whole spectrum of evocations of the land, its people and its stories, and even (for a country confident in itself, perhaps newly emboldened by independence) cosmopolitanism. The way in which these various themes have played out, not just in Finland but in Norway and indeed across the Scandinavian and Nordic lands, is a source of endless fascination, and a subject to which we hope to return in the near future. (With thanks to one of our regular readers who nudged us in this direction!)

Recommended recordings:
Overtures from Finland (Oulu Sinfonia / Gamba) CHSA5336
Scenes from the Kalevala (Lahti Symphony Orchestra / Dima Slobodeniouk) BIS2371
Sibelius – Symphonies 6 & 7, Tapiola (Lahti Symphony Orchestra / Vänskä) BISCD864