★★★★/★★
Cold enough for you? Pull on another layer and listen to the Arctic concerto by a Finnish composer whose music has rather subsided since his death ten years ago. Rautavaara belonged to a generation that had to break free from the shadow of Sibelius and find a different way of expressing bleak environmental beauty. For this extraordinary work, the composer integrated tape recordings of wild cranes, larks and swans into an orchestral landscape of compelling attraction.
Cantus is, in effect, a concerto for birds and orchestra and I much prefer it to Beethoven’s Pastoral imitations and Messiaen’s overrated Oiseaux exotiques. Hugo Alfven wrote ‘Think of autumn and Tchaikovsky’ on top of the score. You don’t have to, and I’m not sure it helps. Just sink into the endless oblivion of these irresistible sounds and winter will pass more swiftly.
I once had lunch with Rautavaara in Helsinki. The choice was salmon or reindeer, both steamed. Simple fare, organic and sustainable. This music has those same virtues, subtly flavoured and suggestive of deeper thoughts. Rautavaara was a reticent man with a turbulent domestic life. He was a first-rate composer, which is all that matters.
The other two works on this album are by the Swede Hugo Alfven – an Wagnerian Festspel and a Gustav II Adolf theatre suite that opens with a Lutheran hymn. Alfven’s orchestral colours are rich, expansive and not evocative of anything much. The conductor Neeme Järvi, in his late 80s, can make a car-repair manual sound exciting and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra play the hell out of their national composer. But this album’s front-rank creator is the bird-keeping Finn next-door. Rautavaara’s is the reputation that will surely rise.
