4.10.2017 Feed
Ideas of North: Hannu Lintu is a real road warrior for music
Hannu Lintu doesn’t mind travelling, not at all. The chief conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra was in Dallas when he spoke about the relief he feels to be away from Helsinki, Finland, his hometown.
Don’t get him wring. He likes Helsinki and he loves his work but “when I am in Helsinki, with my own orchestra, it means I don’t have much time to study anything because I have lots of meetings, rehearsals and interviews.
“When I am travelling I am sort of resting.”
Sort of might be the operative phrase. After conducting four concerts in Texas he jetted home to teach his class at the Sibelius Academy. His next stop is Ottawa for a concert conducted the NAC Orchestra and his friend Angela Hewitt in a performance of Matthew Whittall’s Nameless Seas and two pieces by Sibelius on Oct. 5. Next stop after that … Singapore.
“I know this doesn’t make much sense but why slow down. I still like travelling. I like hotels and airports and airplanes.”
In fact when we spoke he was perusing Whittall’s piece.
“I love it. I have commissioned one piece from him for the Finnish Radio Symphony. I premiered it myself. I have also premiered a song cycle by him for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra that was five years ago. I have always loved his music. It has this mixture of approachability and complexity which I think is always very fruitful combination.
“Accessibility doesn’t necessarily mean easy. But it speaks to audiences. Everybody can hear different things. It’s not very complex music. It’s easy to read. He doesn’t deliberately want to be complex nor does he show off. It’s composed by a musician (Whittall plays french horn) which orchestra musicians recognize as well.”
Lintu has been a regular guest with the NAC and he knows Canada well. With a festival exploring the connections and cultures of two northern nations what does he see?
“If I compare Canada to the U.S., I certainly feel more at home in Canada. I feel that we have the same vocabulary. We share this fascination for nature and the sea and things like that. We are less urban in a way. We might live in a city and love the city but we also still are country people.”
Lintu was born in a small city on the west coast of Finland where the sea was ever present.
“I used to sail when I was a boy. The sea has always been a very important aspect on my life. That’s why I live in Helsinki, because it’s by the sea.”
One of the Sibelius pieces being performed is the Oceanides.
“I don’t think Sibelius would have known that word. In Finnish it’s Aallottaret. Its intention is clear. It is about water and waves and representing something so elemental.
“The piece is very enigmatic. It’s very short. I think it is an episode. … It’s surreal somehow. It’s like one of those small courses they serve at a restaurant, an amuse bouche. … Imagine walking into a room looking at a painting for several minutes and then leaving the room. The painting stays in your mind, affecting you and you don’t really realize it.”
Sibelius has had a couple of anniversaries recently including the 150th of his birth in 2015 and 60th of his death this year. Orchestras around the world have been playing his music. During the Ideas of North, a sizeable chunk of Sibelius repertoire will be played including several symphonies.
For Lintu, Sibelius has a well-earned place on the world stage but is he a sort of patron saint for Finns?
“For a certain generation. For younger Finns, I wouldn’t say so.
“Everyone recognizes that he was a central figure in the nation’s fight for independence (a century ago). Censorship was hard then and it was practically impossible to say things. It was practically impossible to write things so music was an essential vehicle. It can express feelings without words.
“Censorship couldn’t touch that. Kids learn about this in school. They know the arts were a significant part of Finland’s becoming independent.
“During the Second World War, Sibelius was definitely the most famous Finn and he probably still is the most famous. Of course, there are hockey players and Formula One drivers and there are extraordinary minds. But especially during the war he was the symbol and face of Finland abroad.”
There is now a contest to determine the greatest Finn of the past 100 years. The result will be announced on Dec. 6 (the nation’s independence day).
“It will be interesting to see what the result of it is. In modern Finnish society, everybody knows about Sibelius, but I don’t think he’s a saint.”
Lintu says he puts Sibelius in another rank.
“I would like to think of him as part of the western symphonic canon. That’s what he wanted to be himself.
“I see him in a chain that started with Beethoven. They worked same way. I very seldom think of Finland when I conduct his music. I know his music quite well I know Beethoven quite well.”
As he conducts it so much, he has favourite pieces. While he likes the Second Symphony, he prefers the less well known Sixth. But he’s conducting No. 2 in Ottawa.
“I conduct it everywhere. It’s probably the piece I have conducted the most. I still love it a lot, but whenever I have a chance to suggest a piece I suggest No. 6 or 7 (NACO’s Alexander Shelley will lead No. 7). Six is my favourite. It is his most beautiful and most ingenious.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to follow North American programming. They are always worried when there is something contemporary on the program and they always want to compensate. That’s something we don’t have to do in Europe.
In Dallas he conducted the famous Finlandia in four concerts.
“You can imagine that is a piece I have done even more than the Second Symphony.
“It’s certainly a great piece and worth playing no matter how many times you have played it. I don’t object anymore when I’m asked to play Finlandia or Sibelius No. 2. I’m doing same in Tokyo. But it would be great if orchestras in North American had courage to play the lesser known symphonies.”
Even so, he says, he’s always finding something new whenever he returns to these familiar pieces.
“Sometimes I find details I have never noticed before. There is something in Sibelius. It’a about the texture, it’s about how Sibelius composed, there are so many layers and each time is different. He is not a classical composer he is a late Romantic and I would even say he is the first Finnish modernist.
“So if you are late Romantic and a modernist it means your scores are full of details and you always find something new.”
Support for classical music is different in Europe including in Finland, he says. It allows for more new works to be commissioned and performed.
“Sometimes I think in Europe financing is automatic. It’s a machine. They just feed us with money.
“We feel we should actually we should take an even bigger responsibility to play things that haven’t been played much and introducing new composers or those who have been forgotten. That is part of my job with the Finnish Broadcasting Company. ”
Lintu’s relationship with Hewitt began about eight years ago when he first conducted her in Liverpool, England.
Since then they have worked together fairly regularly. In fact he was in Ottawa working on a CD with her.
“She was just in Helsinki four weeks ago on her way to Lapland and she spent the weekend at my place in Helisinki.
“She was practicing Nameless Seas. Matthew came over and we talked about the piece. We are in touch all the time.”
Lintu enjoys the musical friendship.
“If you know someone, the process, especially the rehearsing process, is easier. It is easier to discuss things. It can create complications because even old friends can quarrel.
“I realize I am becoming old, but I like to play with soloists I know. I very seldom want to meet a new one.”
Peter Robb
Lintu and Hewitt
Ideas of North Festival
Where: Southam Hall
When: Oct. 5 at 8 p.m.
Tickets and information: nac-cna.ca
http://artsfile.ca/ideas-of-north-hannu-lintu-is-a-real-road-warrior-for-music
26.6.2017 Feed
INTERVIEW WITH HANNU LINTU REGARDING THE FRSO’S PROGRAMME ON THE 24TH OF MAY 2017
“The Alpine Symphony is no tourist ad”
In its day, Aarre Merikanto’s orchestral poem Pan was considered ultra-modern. How radical is it actually, compared with other European works of the same age?
Merikanto completed the final version of Pan in 1924. He had been mulling over at least two versions of it in his mind, and it had been subjected to a strict development process. The topic would appear to have been occupying him for some time. Because he had written a song also called Pan in 1916, setting a text by V.A. Koskenniemi. The text of this is pretty fantastic. It goes something like this:
“Oh traveller in the night and wilds / immersed in the forest’s dusky gloomy, / oh in whose breast there burns a wanton lust! / Only the forest’s murky eyes he sees / and the nocturnal shadows as they rise and fall, / and the boughs bent over in the tangled woods / and from his hiding place steps Pan. / To his lips he raises his reed pipe, / he plays, plays a song wild and untamed, / and the forest echoes and echoes to a myriad notes. / But reason deserts the traveller in the night, / wandering in the forest’s dusky maze / and he dreams, he dreams of unbridled happiness.”
This can of course be taken as a lightweight description of the frolics of Pan and Syrinx, but there is also a suggestion of something else in the final lines: of a mind that has lost all reason, of madness. Either may be the case in Merikanto’s orchestral poem, but personally I’m inclined to believe there is something personal lurking behind his ultra-expressionism. This notion, and the idiom of the work suggest two points of comparison to me: Debussy’s Jeux of 1912 and Schönberg’s absolutely hysterical Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Accompanying Music to a Film Scene) of 1929. Merikanto’s Pan falls between the two in time, so to my mind he is quite close to the European Zeitgeist in his idiom.
There are on the other hand a few strange features in his music. For there are certain general axioms in his orchestration that have not vanished even from 20th-century music. Regardless of style, it has been the custom in composing for orchestra to double melodic figures; for example, a horn may be doubled on a cello, or a viola on a clarinet and cor anglais; in the simplest case, the first and second violins play the same thing an octave apart. It is precisely in such combinations and juxtapositions of timbre that Richard Strauss, for example, is one of the greatest masters. But there are virtually no such doublings in Merikanto. Each of his horizontal gestures – be it a melody, counter-melody or filler note – stands on its own and is not doubled on any other instrument or instrumental group. This is very unusual. Merikanto was, however, a pupil of Reger, who was likewise an extremely clever orchestrator. Was it possible that his other teacher, Vasilenko in Moscow, left him feeling confused, or did Merikanto give Scriabin’s scores only a cursory reading? Or was it deliberate? It is this feature that gives Pan a certain insubstantiality and timbral blurriness. To me, this is one of the strangest and most fascinating pieces in the history of Finland’s music.
It was also typical of Merikanto, as of the other 1920s Modernists (with the possible exception of Klami) that they spent very little time in each musical episode. Their units might last for, say, only four bars. Just as something interesting is beginning, they pass on to something else. Scriabin, whom these composers admired, is often ostensibly fragmentary, but at deeper level the music is far more sustained. It may be that the young Finnish composers were not able to hear new music anywhere, or at least not in Helsinki. They lacked a broader concept of how such music really sounded. Merikanto’s Pan was performed at the Nordic Music Days in Stockholm, where it was ripped to pieces. It was a terrible humiliation for Merikanto. But we can only speculate on how it was performed on that occasion, seeing how difficult it is even today!
So despite its shortcomings, Pan truly was attuned to the times. Even on a European scale it’s a piece that made Sibelius look outdated. 1924 was also the year in which his seventh symphony was premiered, and Tapiola was still in the making. We can only imagine Sibelius listening to Merikanto’s Pan on the wireless at Ainola and wondering what on earth was going on.
What sort of future might Merikanto and his contemporaries have had if their Modernist experiments had not been discredited?
There’s not really much cause for speculation here, because whatever direction 1920s Modernism had taken, it would in any case probably have been cut short by the war. The war and the stagnation that followed were in my view the biggest disaster in the history of Finland’s music. It is of course fully understandable that the arts were not a priority in the post-war reconstruction of society.
The characteristic features of Finnish music were in fact the consequence of “three nationalist aspects”. First, it was Sibelius’s fate to exist in the heady period of national awakening and the early days of independence, when his position got distorted: he became a national symbol, which caused him a terrible trauma. The second tragedy was the Civil War, which made the general climate extremely conservative and nauseating. People swore by the values of hearth, faith and fatherland and regarded marching songs as great art. The third tragedy was then the Winter and Continuation War, after which classical music counted for nothing. For a young musical culture only about fifty years old, these were big demarcation points that inevitably guided trends.
Of the band of Modernists, Merikanto was the one with the greatest potential in the public eye and hence of course the greatest expectations were levelled at him. He was the city-bred son of a famous father and while still young had already attracted a lot of attention with his opera Helena.
Other young composers were not under similar pressure. They came from up-country and no one knew them. Merikanto’s tragedy were the high expectations and nevertheless the need to break with tradition. But no one can really be blamed for the way he was treated, at least not the audiences or musicians, who could not possibly judge the new art. But some of the blame can be placed with the critics.
When you conduct Mozart or other Viennese Classicists, how much do you have to work on questions of style?
I’m a syncretist on such matters and in this respect no doubt a typical representative of my generation. We have all been influenced by the performance practices of the early music fundamentalists; we have picked out whatever suits us best. And I have no problem accepting a modern concert grand for Mozart.
So style is a sort of hybrid. Many of the FRSO musicians play early music on period instruments, and the orchestra regularly collaborates with conductors specialising in the genre. But I think even the ‘early-music conductors’ are beginning to be syncretists to a greater or lesser degree. Sir Roger Norrington has everything played without vibrato, but musically, even he’s quite a Romantic.
In an orchestra, each player has an opinion on how the music should be played. The discrepancy between different views is greater in Mozart than in Brahms or Strauss. In this sense it’s slightly more work for the conductor to form an overall synthesis of everything the orchestra offers.
The problem in performing Mozart is, to my mind, that the phrases are in a way already early-Romantic, and they should have expression and colour. The expression often vanishes when you start wondering about stylistic authenticity. When I want to listen to Mozart, I choose old recordings by Karl Böhm or Josef Krips. Their renderings let Mozart by strong and sing. And slow, I have to admit. This attitude has been lacking in the past few decades, and to my mind it would make Mozart playing healthier.
In our last interview we talked about Carl Nielsen’s relationship with nature in connection with his fourth symphony. How is this theme manifest in Strauss’s Alpine Symphony?
We seem to have quite a few nature themes on the programme for this season: Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Haydn’s Seasons, Nielsen’s Inextinguishable and now Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. This is of course pure coincidence. It’s also a coincidence that the second theme of the first movement of Nielsen’s fourth symphony is almost the same as the sunrise theme in the Alpine Symphony.
The finest thing about the Alpine Symphony is its orchestration. Strauss himself modestly said at a rehearsal for the premiere that he had at last learnt to orchestrate. And indeed – just listen to the way Strauss describes the thunder of the approaching waterfall and then the waterfall itself – harp, celesta, Glockenspiel and string glissandos – it sounds just like a great mass of water hitting a rock. Or the miraculous feeling of space Strauss evokes of an Alpine meadow: the cows and sheep really do seem to be scattered across the meadow. Or the hollow moment after lightning has struck in the storm scene, before the thunder cracks – you can almost count how far away the storm is.
Nielsen’s nature concept is possibly more abstract than Strauss’s. Behind the Inextinguishable is the idea of nature’s renewal, which may serve as a symbol for many other things. But again, Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is no tourist ad, even though some take it as one. Many say it’s a clever but empty-headed work. True, the Alpine Symphony is descriptive music; there’s a cow, a glacier and a thunder storm. In the background it nevertheless has an impressive spiritual content: Nietzsche’s Antichrist, the idea of human development and life span and the world’s salvation through the arts and science.
The work becomes increasingly serious as it proceeds. It begins by climbing out of bed and leaping briskly into action. The climax is reached at precisely the mathematical midpoint – Strauss is second to none in building up climaxes. The nature of the piece then changes: next comes a section called Apparition during which the Alpine Symphony becomes an allegory for spiritual human development. Profound works tend to seem lightweight, as with Mozart and Strauss. The last ten minutes of the Alpine Symphony proclaim Strauss’s unwavering faith that there is a potential for goodness in each human being and that the arts are of great significance in identifying that goodness.
Interview by Lotta Emanuelsson
Translated by Susan Sinisalo
4.6.2017 Feed
INTERVIEW WITH HANNU LINTU REGARDING THE FRSO’S PROGRAMME ON THE 5TH OF MAY 2017
“The ‘Inextinguishable’ is a song of praise to Nature”
You often plan programmes around a theme. But the silver thread running through this concert is not blatantly obvious. Does the programme have one nevertheless?
Listen to the concert first! By no means do I always plan my programme entities very consciously; I think more about colour or feel. A good programme is not necessarily one that looks smart on paper. And when, like today, there’s a premiere on the programme, I can’t even know what’s coming. Sometimes I talk to the composer beforehand. I ask them whether, say, there’s a literary reference behind their forthcoming work, or whether they have any ideas for what else we might play. On the other hand, I don’t want to trouble composers by constantly asking them what they’re going to write.
Now that Fagerlund’s work is ready, I can see that the energy of Nielsen’s symphony and Fagerlund’s music to some extent inhabit the same world. So the Ravel concerto is sandwiched between two works of inextinguishable energy. But this wasn’t particularly premeditated! My guess is that when they’re heard in succession, they’ll balance one another out and the listener will feel satiated.
Sebastian Fagerlund is on a considerable upward curve, and not only in Finland. What makes him such a noteworthy composer?
It’s the same with Fagerlund as it was with Magnus Lindberg 30 years ago: the orchestra is beginning to feel at home with his music. A symbiosis has evolved between Fagerlund and the FRSO that will, we hope, be inspiring for him, too. He’s familiar with the orchestra’s strengths and even when he’s composing, he maybe imagines who he’s writing for, even a specific player.
Sebastian’s music could be described as musician-oriented. The player doesn’t need a pair of compasses, a ruler or a pocket calculator; he can just pitch himself into the music. Drifts is shorter than Fagerlund’s other recent pieces, and it has a slightly different dramaturgy. His works have often had a clear quick–slow–quick construction with the same basic pulse tick-tocking away in the background.
The form of Drifts is somehow amoeban: the listener may have difficulty working out when it’s slow and when it’s quick. Sure, there’s still the same pulse running right through it, but the orchestration and the motif technique sometimes make certain sections sound a lot slower. The sections overlap kaleidoscopically so that the result is in fact a continuum in which the pulse seems to change even though it’s actually the same.
I’ve done so much music by Sebastian now that I’m beginning to see he has tempo fixations in the same way as other contemporary composers whose music has been played a lot by the FRSO. Just like Magnus Lindberg or Kaija Saariaho, for example, Fagerlund has his own characteristic tempo to which all the work’s tempos relate and that are multiples of the initial tempo.
Fagerlund arrived at his characteristic orchestration by traditional, well-tried means, even though his idiom is in fact modern. The lowest material is slower-moving, and the higher it goes, the more we find faster stuff. The slower foundation produces more harmonics and the timbre carries on upwards. In this work, for example, the foundation is a perfect fifth almost throughout. The harmonic base resonates well and the other material is like a topping. This is not actually a modern idea, because the late-Romantics were already using it.
Maurice Ravel said his G-major concerto was influenced by Mozart. How is this manifest?
Ravel did, yes, make specific mention of the slow movement of Mozart’s clarinet quintet as the model for the slow movement of his own piano concerto. The connection is not very obvious, but it’s evident in the way the instruments enter, or the main theme is embroidered in the recapitulation. Ravel borrowed ideas about timbre from Mozart in his orchestration and instrumentation. He said he wanted to compose a piano concerto of Mozart and Saint-Saëns type, because these composers are “not so profound”! Only a Frenchman can mention Mozart and Saint-Saëns in the same sentence, and at the same time fail to notice the profundity of the Mozart piano concertos.
The elements of Ravel’s music – the Basque background, the Classical French tradition and the influence of jazz – coexist in sweet organic harmony. The second theme of the first movement of the piano concerto could be Gershwin. Ravel was fascinated by jazz and made use of the opportunity, knowing that the concerto would be going on the American market. Then the ticking material, in which the piano merges to become part of the orchestra, reminds me of Petrushka: they are kindred pieces in their mechanicalness. The brevity of the finale is in turn a Classical trait: it’s the same length as, for example, the Haydn symphony finales lasting just a few minutes.
Ravel wanted to call his G-major concerto a divertissement, and it is indeed possible to detect a certain need to “divert”. Ravel’s concerto is as light as a feather. He composed both his concertos at the same time; they lay side-by-side on his desk. Could it be so that more of the pot marked “grave” splashed into the concerto for the left hand than into this concerto?
As we know, Stravinsky called Ravel a Swiss watchmaker. Was he doing Ravel’s composer persona an injustice?
As a person, Ravel may well have been like that. Maybe Stravinsky was alluding to the dapper, sedate man with his love for clocks and mechanical objects rather than to his music. And the works of Ravel do have a certain precision in the sense that they are deliberated and thought out right down to the finest detail. In his best orchestrated works, such as Le Tombeau de Couperin, Mother Goose and Daphne, the place of every note is considered, nothing is splurged and the tone colours are carefully mixed. Maybe Stravinsky was even envious of Ravel’s self-discipline and stylistic consistence, which Stravinsky did not really seem able to achieve.
How do you relate to the Nielsen symphonies?
I was Chief Conductor of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra for a time, and that of course is Nielsen territory. Nielsen played the violin in the Gothenburg Symphony and that’s not far from Copenhagen, so it regards him almost as one of its own. During my term there, I conducted the third, fourth and fifth symphonies a lot. I haven’t done the others. I like the first two very much, but the sixth is still an enigma for me: it’s such a translucent, strict piece that I’m a bit afraid of attacking it. The fourth symphony is my favourite, and I’ve recently conducted it in Tokyo, Moscow and other places.
The thing that appeals to me in the fourth symphony is its unbridled energy, and also its form, which balances with the energy. Nielsen already had a one-movement symphony in mind in around 1914, in other words at the same time as Sibelius was contemplating this format too, though Sibelius didn’t finally write his seventh symphony until the 1920s. Nielsen’s one-movement format is different, however. It’s reminiscent of the idea of Sibelius’s fifth. The movements don’t have names or numbers, even though it’s clear when they begin and end. Nielsen’s idea of a single movement looks more to the past than Sibelius’s does. Nielsen admired the B-minor sonata by Liszt, which was in turn influenced by late Beethoven. Another model for him was Schönberg’s first chamber symphony, which is also in one movement but divided into recognisable sections.
Another thing that appeals to me in Nielsen is his handling of keys. The way they follow one another is sometimes really strange, but at the same time extremely premeditated and calculated. The modulations and the arrivals at certain main keys cause almost physical reactions.
Nielsen was aware that the ordinary listener, who can’t usually analyse or put a name to things, may nevertheless feel and recognise the harmonic processes. He is really clever at playing with listeners’ expectations, at giving them shocks. In leading up to and arriving at the great climaxes, Nielsen is to my mind a genius, one of the best.
The timpani duel is an absolutely unique piece of instrumentation. It’s not just a great stereophonic effect; it’s unadulterated violence, one of the most aggressive moments in symphonic literature. There’s no point covering this aggressiveness up, though it must of course be sonorous and well played.
I can to a certain extent relate to Nielsen as a person. He was known to be a bit crotchety and impatient and couldn’t abide slowness, but he nevertheless had quite a sense of humour. I’ve seen photos of him as a young man making faces and fooling around. In one famous childhood photo he’s looking serious in army uniform, holding a cornet. The cornet’s almost as big as he is. One feels a bit sorry for him, but at the same time his determination is impressive. I sometimes wonder whether there’s any connection between a composer’s nature and his music, and in Nielsen’s case it seems there is.
What do you think Nielsen meant by “inextinguishable”?
Many think “inextinguishable” means that the symphony doesn’t stop, it keeps rushing ahead. And this it does. But that’s not what’s inextinguishable here; the “Inextinguishable” is a song of praise to Nature, to everything that is renewable. Whatever happens in the world, something new will always begin to grow, water will well from somewhere.
The idea of a Dane describing Nature tends to make Finns smile, because to us, Denmark doesn’t have any “nature”, just flat land, tufts of grass and the odd stream here and there. We think we alone understand the relationship between primeval Nature and humanity.
Sibelius’s concept of Nature is so sacred to us and so frighteningly deep. But we all have our own Nature: it’s there in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony just as in Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, and the cow mooing in the Alps is just as profound a creature as the age-old Finnish pine somewhere in deepest Karelia.
As a young man, Nielsen spent a lot of time on the island of Fyn and experienced at first hand the wind, the rain and the plants that pushed up through the earth. He saw music as a symbol of this renewal and made his symphony a manifesto to life. The symbolism which the “Inextinguishable” represents means more to me than the fact that this symphony, even musically, does not seem to extinguish.
Interview by Lotta Emanuelsson
Translated by Susan Sinisalo