Susanna Mälkki, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra – Sibelius: Karelia Suite, Rakastava & Lemminkäinen (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:27 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra can with justification be regarded as ‘Sibelius’s own orchestra’, as it was this orchestra, usually conducted by the composer, that premièred most of his major works. On this disc of three such pieces, the orchestra is conducted by Susanna Mälkki; the recording follows on from their three acclaimed albums devoted to the music of Bartók.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra & Pekka Huusisto and BBC Schottish Symphony Orchestra & Martyn Brabbins – Pictured Within; Jaakko Kuusisto: Symphony (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:06:32 minutes | 811 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
This disc is a double tribute. The first work, Pictured Within, is a collective effort conceived as a major project to mark the 60th birthday of conductor Martyn Brabbins, whose reputation in new music and British music is beyond reproach. Following the pattern of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Pictured Within is a series of 14 variations on a theme, each of which takes up the character of the equivalent variation in Elgar’s work, the difference being that here 14 different composers have each contributed a variation in tribute to Brabbins. Also on the SACD is Jaakko Kuusisto’s Symphony, a fitting tribute to the composer, conductor and violinist who passed away in 2022. Illness left Jaakko no time to complete his work, so it fell to his brother Pekka – who conducts here – and Jari Eskola to finish it. The result is a powerful piece, full of familiar themes and melodies derived from Jaakko’s existing compositions, to which are added autobiographical extra-musical elements. The moving conclusion is a collage of fragmented phrases inspired by the signals emitted by lighthouses and ships, as if Kuusisto’s spirit had been sent out to sea.
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Mika Kares, Szilvia Vörös, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra & Susanna Mälkki – Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle, Op. 11, Sz. 48 (Live) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:30 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Composed in 1911, Bluebeard’s Castle is Béla Bartók’s only opera – a radical masterpiece which has secured a place alongside the other innovative music dramas of the same period, from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande to Berg’s Wozzeck. Planning to write a one-act opera, Bartók settled on a libretto by Béla Balázs with the kind of surreal and/or macabre themes that would soon feature in his two ballets, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin. The main source for the libretto text was a play by Maeterlinck, a retelling of Perrault’s gruesome tale of Barbe-Bleue, the sinister yet strangely seductive wife-killer.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra & Susanna Mälkki – Bartók: Orchestral Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:52 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
On the two previously released Bartók programmes (both highly praised), Susanna Mälkki and her players in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra have recorded Bartók’s three scores for the stage – The Miraculous Mandarin, The Wooden Prince and Bluebeard’s Castle, all written before 1918. The team now takes on two of his late orchestral masterpieces.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds – Rasmussen: Symphony No. 2 ‘The Earth Anew’ (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 53:03 minutes | 554 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dacapo Records
In many ways Sunleif Rasmussen is a pan-Nordic composer. Born in the Faroe Islands in 1961, he has lived in Norway for a period, and today he shuttles between Copenhagen and his native islands. He also has a close association with Finland and Finnish musical life, among other ways through a close friendship of many years with the conductor and violinist John Storgårds; a musical friendship of which the present recording and the CDs Strings against Strings (2007) and Motion/Emotion (2013) are shining examples. Rasmussen speaks more than a handful of the related Nordic languages, and is a great believer in the shared Nordic identity nourished by the common linguistic basis.
His youth did not in fact point in the direction of a life as the absolutely most prominent Faroese composer. There was no musical training on the island of Sandoy when Sunleif Rasmussen was growing up. So he learned to read music from his grandmother. At the end of the 1970s he went to Norway to attend a music college outside Oslo, and it was there that he first heard a symphony orchestra play live – an overwhelming experience, among other reasons because the programme consisted of striking masterworks from the twentieth century: Le Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky and Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev. At the same time he drew great inspiration from the great jazz pianist of the time, Keith Jarrett, and the tenor saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and in fact it was as a jazz pianist – with a single CD on his conscience – that Sunleif Rasmussen developed musically in the 1980s. At that time he was back in the Faroe Islands, before moving to Copenhagen in 1988; the next year he began studying composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in the capital with Professor Ib Nørholm – and later electroacoustic music with Ivar Frounberg.
Shortly after his studies, in 1995-97, Sunleif Rasmussen wrote his best known work, the first symphony, Oceanic Days, for which he received the Nordic Council’s Music Prize as the first and so far the only Faroese to do so. Over the years he has also received grants from the Léonie Sonning Music Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation, and in 2011, as the youngest recipient ever, he won the biggest culture prize of the Faroes, the Mentanarheiðursløn landsins. His music is played in most parts of the world.
In the works in the 1990s as today, Rasmussen found his inspiration in natural phenomena and Faroese melodies. In the 1990s these melodies were only present in the hidden composition work as a basis for serial and spectral principles – where notes and sounds are thoroughly and systematically organized. During the last decade, suggestions or imitations of Faroese folk melodies and rhythms have been far more dominant in his music.
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Truls Mørk, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds – Rautavaara: Modificata, Towards the Horizon & Incantations (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:17 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ondine
This new recording couples Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s latest concerto works with an orchestral piece from his early Modernist period (Modificata; 1957/2003). The virtuoso Percussion Concerto Incantations (2008) features the Scottish percussion soloist Colin Currie, who is the dedicatee and première performer of this work. Currie wrote himself the virtuoso cadenza to the final movement. Rautavaara’s Second Cello Concerto Towards the Horizon (2009) was written for cellist Truls Mørk and plays continuously in one 20-minute movement. Reviewing the premiere the Star Tribune noted that the composer “acknowledges a ‘taste for eternity’ and a vain of mysticsm runs through his work.” Einojuhani Rautavaara is recognized as one of the most notable Finnish composers after Jean Sibelius. His recordings on Ondine have been bestsellers and garnered numerous awards (including a recent GRAMMY nomination for his opera Kaivos). Under their chief conductor John Storgårds, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra builds on long-time pedigrees of performing their compatriot’s music.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra & Susanna Mälkki – Bartok: The Wooden Prince & The Miraculous Mandarin Suite (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:13:07 minutes | 863 MB | Genre: Orchestral
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin are – together with the earlier opera Bluebeard’s Castle – the only stage works by Béla Bartók. They stand apart from the more abstract and often more explicitly folk-related character of the music that we primarily associate with the composer. They are nevertheless major achievements that in different ways highlight Bartók’s imaginative use of the modern orchestra. Set in an enchanted forest, The Wooden Prince is based on a fairytale-like libretto featuring a prince and princess. The two are subjected to various trials, but at the end of the ballet they are allowed to come together and live – we assume – happily ever after. In stark contrast, The Miraculous Mandarin takes place in an urban brothel where three robbers force a girl to seduce men so that they can overpower and kill them. The subject-matter and the erotic qualities of much of the music caused a scandal at the première in 1926, and for a long time the score was primarily performed in the shorter concert version heard on the present disc, the first from the team of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki, the orchestra’s chief conductor since 2016.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra & John Storgards – Madetoja: Symphony No. 2 – Kullervo – Elegy (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:02:03 minutes | 2,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2xHD – Ondine
This new release of works by Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947) features his Symphony No. 2, first performed in 1918, it is the most significant piece of music written in Finland since the symphonies of Sibelius. The album, originally recorded in DXD, was mastered using our 2xHD proprietary system. In order to achieve the most accurate reproduction of the original recording we tailor our process specifically for each project, using a selection from our pool of state-of-the-art audiophile components and connectors. The process begins with a transfer to analog from the original 24bits/96kHz resolution master, using cutting edge D/A converters. The analog signal is then sent through a hi-end tube pre-amplifier before being recorded directly in DXD using the dCS905 A/D and the dCS Vivaldi Clock. All connections used in the process are made of OCC silver cable. DSD and 192kHz/24Bit versions are separately generated, directly from the analog signal.
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Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra & John Storgårds – Korngold: Much Ado about Nothing – Sinfonietta (2012/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:27:19 minutes | 1,55 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © 2xHD – Ondine
This release contains the world premiere recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing with the complete incidental music, written for chamber orchestra but performed here by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under John Storgårds. Completing the programme is Korngold’s Sinfonietta with its richly orchestrated melodies, dreamy music and imposing finale.
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