Sunrays – World Premiere of Maija Hynninen’s Organ Concerto
Guards Band
Petri Komulainen, conductor
Jan Lehtola, organ
Programme:
Jukka Linkola: Sisu
Maija Hynninen: Helios, world premiere
Magnus Lindberg: Gran Duo
Aulis Sallinen: Palace Rhapsody
This all-Finnish concert is part of the Juhlat – Säveltäjät 80 vuotta concert series, organized by the Society of Finnish Composers.
Jukka Linkola: Sisu
Pianist, composer, and conductor Jukka Linkola has worked as a conductor at the Helsinki City Theatre and taught music at, among other places, the Sibelius Academy. He has composed music for his own jazz ensembles and big band, and has expanded his work toward classical music as well. Linkola’s versatile output includes operas and concertos. His style, which brushes against neoclassicism, is characterized by freely tonal melody, capricious rhythm, and dissonant, often bitonal harmony.
The main theme of Sisu is borrowed from Linkola’s opera Elina, where it depicted the stubborn and fierce character of the male protagonist, Klaus Kurki. Another important idea is a chorale theme. Numerous subsidiary themes alternate between playfulness and brilliance. The opening clarinet–bassoon duet returns in varied form in the recapitulation, followed by the restatement of the main theme. The closing chorale theme serves as a kind of remembrance of our ancestors fighting for their homeland.
Sisu was commissioned in 1999 by the Concordia College Band in Moorhead, Minnesota.
Maija Hynninen: Helios
“Helios, a concerto for organ and symphonic wind orchestra, explores the points of contact between organ and wind orchestra—from their most delicate, particle-like states to densely powerful ones. In ancient Greece, Helios meant the sun or the sun god, who, driving his fierce four-horse chariot across the sky, brought light to the world. It was believed that as he drove, Helios could also see everything happening on earth from his lofty vantage point. Like Helios, the organ leads the listener through the work, shaping its form with sounds from its high pipes.
The sun and its heliosphere, in turn, lead the imagination toward space and the various forms of matter—from stardust to massive bodies—mass, energy, and power, as well as more unfamiliar phenomena such as magnetic fields and their shifting interconnections. NASA’s Voyager probes, launched in 1977, have already passed beyond the planets into interstellar space. Their journey continues, even though their old technology can no longer withstand the conditions beyond the heliosphere. The concerto also draws inspiration from these probes’ passage through space and time, which traces a unique portrait of our wondrous universe.”
– Maija Hynninen
Magnus Lindberg: Gran Duo
Magnus Lindberg likes to describe himself as both a romantic and a modernist, seeing no contradiction in this. He also draws a clear line between serious and commercial music. In Lindberg’s view, serious music does not need to be “understood.” Instead, he offers a simple listening tip: “Sit down, focus, and take it as it comes.”
A frequent point of reference for Gran Duo is Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments. The two works share the same instrumentation, although Lindberg adds a bass clarinet to his palette. Neither work uses percussion to sharpen articulation.
Gran Duo is essentially a dialogue between woodwinds and brass. Playing with stereotypes, one can imagine feminine, high woodwinds set against masculine, low brass. As the work progresses, these groups divide into ever smaller units and soloists. The piece is nominally divided into five movements, yet the overall impression is of a seamless whole. Gran Duo was commissioned by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and premiered in celebration of the year 2000.
Aulis Sallinen: Palace Rhapsody
Aulis Sallinen’s successful opera The Palace premiered in 1995 at the Savonlinna Opera Festival and was first performed in its original English version at the New York City Opera in 1998. Palace Rhapsody is based on this opera, drawing on its most important themes.
Sallinen approached the rhapsody in the spirit of the 18th-century Harmonie tradition—wind arrangements of music for performance at outdoor events.
The opera The Palace is a dark satire on authoritarian power. The libretto is based on two different sources. Characters are borrowed from Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, but the basic premise comes from Ryszard Kapuściński’s novel The Emperor, which depicts the downfall of Haile Selassie, the last Emperor of Ethiopia. Palace Rhapsody was completed in 1996 as a joint commission by the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the College Band Directors National Association in the USA.
Rather than a simple potpourri of the opera’s best melodies, Palace Rhapsody juxtaposes contrasting musical material to create tension and emotional ambiguity. Despite its rhapsodic title, the work’s character is unmistakably symphonic.