8.1. at 19:00 Helsinki Music Centre

Hannu Lintu conductor Olli Mustonen

Jovanka Trbojevic: Vertigo 17 min

Béla Bartók: No. 1 25 min I Allegro moderato – Allegro – Allegro moderato II Andante – Allegro III Allegro molto 1

INTERVAL 20 min

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 36 min I Poco sostenuto – Vivace II Allegretto III Scherzo (Presto) IV Allegro con brio

Interval at about 19:50. The concert will end at about 21. Broadcast live on Yle Radio 1 and Yle Areena. Jovanka Béla Bartók: Piano Trbojevic: Vertigo Concerto No. 1 Jovanka Trbojevic (b. 1963) was a bold It seemed only natural for Béla Bartók splash of colour on the contemporary (1881–1945) to address the relationship Finnish musical canvas. She left a num- between his own instrument, the piano, ber of unfinished works on her untimely and tradition in the form of a concerto. death in 2017. His three piano concertos crystallise his Premiered by the Tampere Philharmonic stylistic aims – two of them composed in in 2011, Vertigo is dedicat- his mature period and the third what was ed to Hannu Lintu, at that time its Chief in practice to be his very last work. Conductor. “Vertigo” means dizziness, a Bartók did not feel totally at home in the sense of feeling off balance, and accord- modern urban environment, and in his ‘night ing to Trbojevic the piece is “a drama in music’ nature gave voice to the sounds of the mind” and a description of its accept- nature silenced by mankind. By drawing on ance. We have each of us at some time ex- folk music, he sought to unearth something perienced an inner vertigo, she said. wilder and more primordial. Scored for large orchestra, Vertigo un- Piano Concerto No. 1, composed in 1926, dergoes deep mental processes. It calls is far, far removed from civilisation. The 2 to mind the film of the same name by marriage of piano and percussions points Hitchcock (1958) and the music com- way back to pre-historical times, to rock posed for it by Bernard Herrmann. paintings and the origin of music. The The orchestral sound is almost delirious, folk rhythms are evocative of Stravinsky’s and the texture flashes as in the moment Rite of Spring. The piano is surrounded before giddiness. The strings dart here above all by percussions and winds; this, and there, and the winds flutter like ques- to Bartók, was the best way to bring out tion marks. The heaving orchestra grad- its percussive aspect. Only now and then ually abates until all of a sudden, a star- did he assign the piano a purely percus- lit sky appears. The turmoil still goes on, sive role, however. The decisive feature of but now as part of the light. The orchestra the soundscape is, in the slow movement glides quietly through the water like a particularly, the combination of piano and submarine. The murky currents gather in percussion timbres. clumps of sounds and slowly vanish into The second movement is like a shaman the darkness. in a trance. The piano and percussions beat out muffled ritual rhythms while the winds hum incantations. Echoes of anoth- er world hover in the air after a thundering climax. The finale rhythms have a dance- like lack of constraint that looks ahead to the blatantly cheerful second piano con- certo. Ludwig van Hannu Lintu

Beethoven: Hannu Lintu took over as the eighth Chief Symphony No. 7 in Conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony A Major, Op. 92 Orchestra in August 2013, after years of highly-acclaimed collaboration with the The works of (1770– orchestra. During the 2019/2020 season 1827), straddling the border between he will conduct the FRSO in 14 concerts at Classicism and Romanticism, reflect the the Helsinki Music Centre and take it on changing meanings assigned to Antiquity. tours to Central Europe and Japan. The seventh symphony is a sort of synthesis In addition to his post with the FRSO, of Classical Apollonian and world-embrac- Hannu Lintu will this season be making ing Dionysian. It also paved the way for the guest appearances with the symphony universal humanity of his late period. in Montreal, Detroit, Chicago, The symphony is a stretched-out contin- Boston, with the Orchestre de Paris uum of communal ecstasy. The only point and the Netherlands Radio Symphony at which the flow is halted within a move- Orchestra. Last season included de- ment is the Trio section that was tradi- buts with the Boston Symphony and the tionally part of the Scherzo structure, and Hungarian National Philharmonic, guest even this has its own amusing details. appearances with the Baltimore, St. Louis 3 Instead of the traditional building and Cincinnati Symphonies, the New Japan blocks, the dominant feature of this sym- Philharmonic, the Singapore Symphony phony is rhythm – dance steps and clas- and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. sical poetic metres in hypnotic repetition. Hannu Lintu studied the and pi- The result affords a glimpse of both an- ano at the in his native cient bacchanalia and idealised country and later orchestral life, complete with folk tunes. in the class of Jorma Panula. He attend- The premiere of his seventh symphony ed masterclasses with Myung-Whun in December 1813 was one of the greatest Chung at L’Accademia Musicale Chigiana audience hits in Beethoven’s career. True, in Siena and was the winner of the Nordic some of his contemporaries reckoned he Conducting Prize in Bergen in 1994. He was out of his mind by the time he reached has recorded on the , BIS, Hyperion the finale, if not before. The introduction and other labels. to the first movement builds up the ten- sion before the music sweeps everything before it in a burst of romping energy. Melancholy replaces the jollity in the slow movement, building up to a powerful ex- pression of grief. From then onwards, the music grows steadily more boisterous. Far from being a Viennese curtain-closer, the end is a raving riot of sound.

Programme notes by Auli Särkiö-Pitkänen translated (abridged) by Susan Sinisalo Olli Mustonen The Finnish

Pianist, conductor and , Olli Radio Symphony Mustonen got launched on an internation- Orchestra al career back in the mid-1980s and has since been the soloist with such eminent The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra orchestras as the Berlin, New York and (FRSO) is the orchestra of the Finnish Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Chicago Broadcasting Company (Yle). Its mission Symphony, the Cleveland and Amsterdam is to produce and promote Finnish musical Concertgebouw Orchestras, the Orchestre culture and its Chief Conductor as of au- de Paris, all the great London orchestras tumn 2013 has been Hannu Lintu. and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in The Radio Orchestra of ten players St. Petersburg. He has released dozens of founded in 1927 grew to symphony or- discs on different labels (Philips, Decca, chestra proportions in the 1960s. Its Chief RCA, BIS, Ondine, Alba and others). That Conductors have been Toivo Haapanen, of Preludes by Shostakovich and Alkan Nils-Eric Fougstedt, , (1991) won both Edison and Gramophone Okko Kamu, Leif Segerstam, Jukka-Pekka Awards. His discography also includes solo Saraste and , and taking discs of works by Mussorgsky, Beethoven, over from Hannu Lintu in 2021 will be 4 Bach, Sibelius and Prokofiev, and he was Nicholas Collon. both the soloist and the conductor in a re- In addition to the great Classical- cording of the complete Beethoven piano Romantic masterpieces, the latest con- concertos with the Tapiola Sinfonietta. He temporary music is a major item in the has recorded the Prokofiev piano concer- repertoire of the FRSO, which each year tos with Hannu Lintu and the FRSO and premieres a number of Yle commissions. is now recording the complete Bartók pi- Another of the orchestra’s tasks is to re- ano concertos. Olli Mustonen made his cord all Finnish orchestral music for the conducting debut in 1991. The Helsinki Yle archive. During the 2019/2020 season, Festival Orchestra founded by him gave the FRSO will premiere four works com- its debut concert in 2001 and has been on missioned by Yle. Also on the programme tour to Central Europe, Japan and China. are a large-scale collaboration between Yle and the Helsinki Festival: Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust. The sympho- nies and concertos of will occupy special status during the sea- son, while the RSO Festival now to be held for the second time will feature new and large-scale works by Magnus Lindberg. Among the visiting conductors will be Esa-Pekka Salonen, , Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Sakari Oramo, and a host of young Finnish artists will make their debut as FRSO soloists. The FRSO has recorded works by Mahler, Bartók, Sibelius, Hakola, Lindberg, Saariaho, Sallinen, Kaipainen, Kokkonen and others. It has twice won a Gramophone Award: for its disc of Lindberg’s Concerto in 2006 and of Bartók Concertos in 2018. Other distinctions have included BBC Music Magazine, Académie Charles Cros and MIDEM Classical awards. Its disc of tone poems and songs by Sibelius won an International Classical Music Award (ICMA) in 2018, and it has been the re- cipient of a Finnish EMMA award in 2016 and 2019. The FRSO regularly tours to all parts of the world. During the 2019/2020 season its schedule will include tours to Central 5 Europe and Japan under Hannu Lintu. The FRSO concerts are broadcast live on the Yle Areena and Radio 1 channels and are recorded and shown later on Yle Teema and TV1.