This one’s kind of in two contrasting halves, but I feel like they complement each other well and make a very good argument that even in modern, recently-written concert music, there’s great variety and deeply satisfying quality. It’s not all dissonant atonal noise or film-score-type concert suites.
We’ve got two pieces on each half, instead of just one big piece for the second half. As grand and epic as Rautavaara’s third symphony is, it has a running time of only just over half an hour, so it seemed as good a time as any to work in a fellow Finn with a really fascinating short work who’s likely a new name for many listeners (myself included).
Here’s our program:
Adams and Glass don’t need any promoting. Glass has 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify, compared with Lindberg’s 1,678 and Rautavaara’s 21,000. (Adams actually only has double that, at 44k.) I enjoy a lot of Glass’s music very much, but he doesn’t need my support or focused attention. That said, my article about his eighth is performing noticeably well, so his name does draw crowds.
Lindberg’s Chorale is a new piece to me (and to be honest, Lindberg’s name is a new name to me, relatively speaking), but it’s a dense little work of great color and detail.
Inexplicably, Rautavaara was one of the first composers I wrote about back when I started the original Fugue for Thought, with an article about his first symphony which I’m not even going to link here. First five articles I ever wrote there were Myaskovsky 2, Nielsen 5, Rachmaninoff 3, Schumann 3, and Rautavaara 1. What?
And it is funny how you can come full circle with things. I’ll perhaps get back around to writing about his first (or second) eventually, but it was his third that really blew me away in this article I wrote for my Finnish Symphony Series back in 2017. Good stuff.
I guess in this program there isn’t really a ‘concert standard’ or repertoire regular, but Philip Glass’s name is known and loved enough I think that he fits the bill as the big draw on the program. The Adams piece is also a fun, well-known crowdpleaser.
Rautavaara’s symphony is the oldest work on the program, dating from 1960, followed by Adams and Glass in the 80s and Lindberg’s work dating from 2002. As full concert programs go, that’s very modern, but I really don’t think there’s anything here that most people would turn their noses up at with the possible exception of the Lindberg, but it is a soulful, soft, intricate work beyond the immediate “this is really atonal/dissonant” impression a first-time listener might have. Just enjoy.
Links
First: Short Ride in a Fast Machine