The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Sometimes a distinctive musical personality can come to typify the picture of a nation’s music to the exclusion of most of their contemporaries: think of Elgar’s prominence in British music at the turn of the last century. The situation in a less populous country such as Finland can be even more marked. Sibelius was by far the most dominant figure in Finnish classical music during the first half of the 20th century, despite the fact that for the last 30 years of his life – until his death in 1957 at the age of 91 – he wrote no major works at all apart from the much-speculated over and apparently destroyed Eighth Symphony. ‘Sibelius’s Silence’ has been pored over endlessly by biographers, academics and journalists, as have the features of his music – the runic echoes, elemental pedal notes, subtle gear changes, increasingly spare textures and dissonances that appear to make it so evocative of the wild Finnish landscape.

Sibelius’s contemporaries and immediate successors have received less attention internationally, although the profiles of Robert Kajanus (1856–1933) – an important conducting champion of Sibelius’s work – and of Sibelius’s brother-in-law Armas Järnefelt (1869–1958) are relatively familiar by dint of association. But it is three younger composers all of whose surnames begin with the letter ‘M’ that perhaps best illustrate what else was going on in Finnish music of the time away from the Sibelian headlines.

The first of these is Erkki Melartin (1875–1937), who studied at the Helsinki music school in the 1890s before becoming a pupil of Robert Fuchs in Vienna at the turn of the century. Like Sibelius before him and many others, Melartin’s further studies necessarily took him out of his native land. It was no doubt in Vienna that he encountered the music of Gustav Mahler, and in 1909 he conducted the first Nordic performance of Mahler’s music: the Andante from the Second Symphony. Active as a conductor across Scandinavia as well as Finland, Melartin also travelled widely, to North Africa and India, and exotic sounds crop up in his own ‘serious’ music, which centred on symphonies, of which he finished six with a further three sketched. None are currently available on disc, although a complete set recorded by the Tampere Philharmonic under Leonid Grin previously issued by Ondine is well worth seeking out. These works reveal an imaginative personal voice with distinct Mahlerian influences, as well as the inclusion of three untexted female voices in the Fourth Symphony, ‘Summer’ (1913).

Melartin’s lighter music concentrated on salon genres and an extensive output of songs, but his serious works are dominated by the opera Aino (1912), based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. With a notable Wagnerian flavour, the action includes the hero Väinö fashioning a kantele – a plucked zither and the Finnish national instrument – from a birch tree. The recording by Ulf Söderblom and Lahti forces on Ondine is still in the catalogue, and a great starting point for anyone wanting to take the plunge into Melartin’s music.

An arguably more original symphonic voice is to be found in the music of Leevi Madetoja (1887–1947). Like Melartin, Madetoja studied in Helsinki and with Fuchs in Vienna, but also in Paris and Berlin. And, crucially, he spent a period as a private pupil of Sibelius (1906–10). His three extant symphonies (a fourth, substantially completed, was stolen while Madetoja was travelling through Paris) together constitute the greatest Finnish contribution to the genre apart from Sibelius, and deserve to be far better known. The Second Symphony (1916–18) is his masterpiece, its Andante second movement grippingly elemental, and the whole work shows a mastery of pacing, orchestral colour (a legacy from his French studies) and keen ear for evocative dissonance, all of which make it the perfect starting point for anyone wanting to explore Finnish symphonism beyond the familiar works of Sibelius. The excellent recordings by the Helsinki Philharmonic and John Storgårds on Ondine, coupled with more of Madetoja’s orchestral music including the striking Kullervo, make a most compelling case for this under-appreciated composer.

Beyond the symphonies, Madetoja’s most notable contribution to Finnish music was his 1924 opera Pohjalaisia (The Ostrobothnians), a three-acter in the verismo mould set in the Ostrobothnia region of central Finland. The work took Madetoja six years to complete, but its Helsinki premiere gave him the greatest success of his career, and it soon came to occupy the status of Finland’s national opera. No complete recording of Pohjalaisia is currently available, although the orchestral suite from the work features on a competitively-priced two-disc Chandos set of Madetoja’s symphonies by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Petri Sakari.

Opera was a genre that Sibelius engaged with (unsuccessfully) only in his early years. His first attempt, The Building of the Boat from the mid 1890s, came to nothing (though he rused much of its music elsewhere), while the one-act The Maiden in the Tower lay unperformed until 1981 has never entered the regular repertoire. Another Finnish composer, Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958), was more successful, albeit posthumously. A native of Helsinki, Merikanto was entering maturity at just the moment that Finland gained independence. Initially more cosmopolitan than many of his peers, and with an education that took in Helsinki, Leipzig (with Reger) and pre-revolutionary Moscow, Merikanto initially embraced early modernism (notably Scriabin, whose music he heard in Russia), although in later years turned to Romantic nationalism. His 1922 opera Juha, unperformed during his lifetime, bears the unmistakable influence of Puccini – including a sparkling celesta in its orchestration – as well as moments of Expressionism alongside folk influences. It was thought ‘too modernist’ by its commissioners at Finnish Opera, who blocked its performance. Since its eventual emergence from silence after Merikanto’s death it has become regarded as one of the most outstanding of Finnish operas, and its current absence from the catalogue is a gap waiting to be filled.

Away from the larger symphonic and operatic genres and the ‘three Ms’, the extensive piano output of Selim Palmgren (1878–1951) is currently being explored by Jouni Somero on the Grand Piano label. Its salonesque scale and style provides a valuable window onto the more domestic side of Finnish music-making in early-20th-century Finland.

Our whistle-stop tour of Finnish music will continue at a future date, with a look at music of the later 20th century and contemporary works.

Recommended recordings:
Melartin - Aino (Lahti SO / Söderblom) BISCD119394
Melartin - Traumgesicht, Marjatta, The Blue Pearl (Isokoski, Finnish RSO / Lintu) ODE12832
Madetoja - Symphonies 1 & 3 (Helsinki PO / Storgårds) ODE12112