The Unseen and the Seen – Music from the USA
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Susanna Mälkki, conductor
Cecelia Hall, mezzo-soprano
Ville Rusanen, baritone
Contrary to previous information, Fleur Barron will not be performing in the concert.
Programme:
Andrew Norman: Unstuck (Finnish premiere)
Thomas Adès: America: A Prophecy
John Adams: The Wound-Dresser (Finnish-language premiere)
Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2
– Andante moderato
– Allegro
– Adagio cantabile
– Lento maestoso
– Allegro molto vivace
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Susanna Mälkki will present at the Helsinki Festival a United States–themed concert featuring rarely performed works and two world premieres. The concert will offer four perspectives on the United States.
About his work Unstuck, Andrew Norman says:
“I have never been as stuck as I was in the winter of 2008. This piece lay on my desk for a long time as a jumble of musical fragments without a coherent whole.”
“The breakthrough came through Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. I realized that the lack of consistency in my ideas simply had to be accepted—it resembled the ‘unsticking’ from different points in time, much like Vonnegut’s style. Fragments of the beginning, middle, and end of the music appear in the wrong places, just like flashbacks and flashforwards in Vonnegut’s work.”
America: A Prophecy (1999) was part of a series of commissions by the New York Philharmonic to celebrate the new millennium. In this apocalyptic prophecy, British composer Thomas Adès took as his theme the destruction of the Mayan civilization in the early 16th century during the Spanish invasion. According to the invaders’ propaganda, the Maya—enslaved by priests and nobility—were liberated and brought into the sphere of advanced European science, religion, and technology.
The Mayan music in America: A Prophecy, consisting of only a few notes, is blissfully simple. No original melodies survived, but some texts did. At the end, the soloist utters the sombre observation: “Ash knows no pain.” With the final four chords, the glowing coal cools into ash.
The Wound-Dresser (1988–1989), for chamber orchestra and baritone soloist, was composed by John Adams and is based on a poem by Walt Whitman. The poet recounts his own experiences as a volunteer nurse tending the wounded during the American Civil War. The text is an unflinching and hyperrealistic testimony to the plight of injured soldiers.
Adams’s composition pays deep respect to Whitman’s poem. The music supports the baritone’s recitation with long-lined orchestral parts that mostly remain in quiet dynamics. Despite the harrowing tragedy, the overall tone of the music is restrained and elegiac. Its beautiful portrayal of human touch brings a glimmer of light to the dreamlike ending. The Finnish translation of Whitman’s text is by Johanna Freundlich.
American identity forms the deepest core of Charles Ives’s output. As source material for his compositions, he drew on popular melodies from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Civil War–era marches and soldiers’ songs, as well as hymns. In his Second Symphony (1897–1902), this local musical heritage, combined with the traditional German–Austrian Romantic symphonic style, produced a highly distinctive result. For today’s European listener, the network of quotations in the work is not as familiar, though there are also oblique borrowings from European classics such as Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner.
The Second Symphony is divided into five movements, but it can also be seen as a three-part structure, with the first two and last two movements each forming thematically connected pairs. The core of the symphony, the slow third movement, is also the longest in duration.
In this work, Ives’s voice-leading is realized with free counterpoint and sometimes with layered motivic material. Dissonances are often resolved unexpectedly—or not at all. The same unpredictability applies to the overall direction of the music; the next move is hard to anticipate. As a final joke, Ives ends the symphony with a resounding dissonant chord.