Onnee oi EP! ! Esa Pekka Salonen's 60 th Birthday celebrated in style livestream from the Helsinki Festival, marking its 50th anniversary. Party atmosphere - you don't need a word of Finnish to pick up on the obvious good humoured vibe ! At first you don't know what's happening. Strange sounds evolve from round the hall, gradually coalescing into form. It's the Korvat auki Society for Contemporary Music, which Salonen had a hand in founding in 1977. An experimental piece by five young composers operating together and in contrast. the text's in Finnish,with no subtitles, but the message is clear "Onnee oi, E P !" which presumably means "Congratulations, Esa Pekka !"
A cheerful programe too, starting with Heinrich Biber's Battaglia, paired with Ivan Moskolov The Iron Foundry. Three hundred years between them, but they share similar energy. I don't kmow if either is basic repertoire for the Finnish National Opera Orchestra, but they were a great warm-up for Salonen's Pollux (2018). In his notes for his publishers (Chester) Salonen has written "During the composition process of Pollux, I encountered a strange problem: my material seemed to want to grow in two completely opposite directions. Finally, I realised that these very different musical identities (I had referred to them as brothers in my sketches) would not fit into one cohesive formal unit, a single piece. They simply couldn’t coexist.
This made me think of the myth of the non-identical twins Castor and Pollux who share half of their DNA, but have some extreme phenotype differences, and experience dramatically different fates"......."My solution was to write two independent but genetically linked orchestral works. Pollux, slow and quite dark in expression, is the first of them. Castor, extroverted and mostly fast, will follow later.
Pollux has a ritualistic character, based on a mantra rhythm I heard some months ago during dinner in a restaurant in the 11th arrondissement in Paris. A post-grunge band played on the background track, and I wrote down the bass line on a paper napkin not knowing exactly what it was and who the musicians were. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and decided to use a heavily modified version of it in Pollux. The pattern has been distilled to pure rhythm, and slowed down to less than quarter speed of the original.
Another source of material is a chorale (here wordless) based on the first lines of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus):
Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!
O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr.
(There rose a tree. O pure transcendence!
O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!)
I was very taken by the funny and surreal, Salvador Dali-like image of a tree growing out of the ear. The metaphor is far from obvious, but it is clear that Orpheus can unify art and nature by the sheer force of his song". Here, it was conducted by Alan Gilbert.
Salonen himself conducted an un-named new work by Paula Vesala. Harps strings and electronic keyboard introduce a song, more pop song than art song, but perfectly OK for a cheerful occasion like this. Tributes followed from other artists, some sincere and one cringe-makingly corny. For shame ! Salonen deserves better. Then back to music, the way Salonen speaks best, with Ravel Daphnis et Chloé, Suite no. 1 and Modest Mussorgski: Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov. Matti Salminen as soloist, no less ! Loved the casual, laidback ambience of this occasion. Salonen and Vesala sat on the edge of the stage, chatting. I had no idea what they were talking about, but it felt down to earth and intimate, like two kids wondering about the marvels of Nature and of music. Which is what it's all about, really.
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