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Hybrid SACD/CD MULTICHANNEL 5.1 Hybrid SACD/CD MULTICHANNEL 5.0 Pehr Henrik Nordgren As in a Dream Marko Ylönen Lilli Maijala Olivier Thiery Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra Juha Kangas - 1 - Music as Non-Representational Narrative Looking back in time, we can see a very interesting constellation of generations in 20th century music. Of course, those seeking exceptions will find them (from Varèse, Messiaen and Carter via Pettersson, Britten, Dutilleux, Robert Simpson, Crumb and Rautavaara to Tishchenko or Vasks). The “icons of the avant-garde”, i.e. the big stars with a basically dissonant and predominantly atonal attitude still regarded as yardsticks of ‘modernism’, were, however, mainly born in the 1920s: Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, György Kurtág, Hans Werner Henze, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann – the close society of celebrities that still dominates the aesthetics of ‘new music’ on grants committees and in intellectual discourse. These were followed by the generation born in the 1930s that marked the turning point towards ‘post-modernism’, cultivated minimalism, placed music in the service of religion in an archaic way and became much more successful commercially because it transcended the borders of the ‘classical ghetto’: Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, Per Nørgård, Krzysztof Penderecki, Giya Kancheli, Henryk Mikolai Gorecki, Valentin Silvestrov, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. For the progress hardliners, finding a suitable way of dealing with the return of traditions and the restitution of consonance on such a broad basis became a hard nut to crack, and many new categorisations were introduced to obscure the impasse of uncompromising atonality. But the next generation, born between 1940 and 1950, defied categorisation even more. How could we find even a rough common denominator for composers such as Anders Eliasson, Pehr Henrik Nordgren, Jean-Louis Florentz, Yevgeni Stankovitch, Tristan Keuris, Kalevi Aho, Peter Lieberson, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Peter Michael Hamel, Claude Vivier, Ragnar Söderlind, Christopher Rouse, Lepo Sumera or Olivier Greif? An incredibly potent and creative generation found its voice – a generation whose potential has still not been comprehensively explored and that still has not become an integral part of the international concert repertoire. We live in exciting times. We are just beginning to appreciate the significance, originality, and mastery of these composers in their endless diversity, and to sense the influence their music already has and will continue to exert on future generations. Pehr Henrik Nordgren ranks among the most outstanding masters of this grossly underrated generation. For a long time, the establishment did not take him seriously as a composer. The first to make a strong musical impact on him in childhood was Shostakovich, in a spine-chilling excerpt from the finale of the Fifth Symphony he heard on a left-over shellac record. He began playing the violin and immediately started to compose large-scale tone poems for solo violin, wide-ranging monodies in which he imagined a mighty unison orchestra such as in Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Sam- - 2 - uel Goldenberg, Baba Yaga). When he was fourteen, having received no instruction, he composed some orchestral works. He then appeared in public as music critic for a Communist weekly paper while studying musicology and taking private lessons in composition from the notable symphonist Joonas Kokkonen. Nord- gren’s reviews, with their utmost sincerity and their effort to be objective and devoid of malice and flattery, are simply captivating, but his first successes as a composer led him to give up writing reviews. His first composition to be performed was a 10-minute Notturno for string orchestra in 1965. Instead of symphonies, he started writing Euphonies for orchestra. Euphony I made him a well-known name in 1967, and Euphony II marked his “breakthrough” in 1969. His objective at that time was “to write melodic music in a cluster-like manner close to Ligeti’s. Harmonically, everything is built on clusters, but the result is expressively melodious. I never gave up this idea: ‘melodic-polyphonic clusters’…” It is very obvi- ous from the earliest work on this CD, As in a Dream Op. 21 for cello and piano from 1974, what Nordgren means by ‘melodic-polyphonic clusters’, hand in hand with expressively ornamenting microtonality. Nordgren’s close friendship with Juha Kangas began while they were both studying in Helsinki. Kangas encouraged him to occupy himself with Finnish – and in particular Ostrobothnian – folk music. As early as 1968, this was already combining in a very unorthodox way with the total chromaticism of the clusters in Four Pictures of Death. The two friends then parted way when Nordgren went to Japan, where he assimilated a totally different culture with melodic shaping principles strongly influenced by the art of cal- ligraphy. There, he first composed his mightyAgnus Dei incorporating invective on environmental pollution and a 20-minute ‘panorama’ of the earth’s contamination. From then on, we find another thread running through his œuvre: an ethical, social, political orientation in a world suppressed by reckless profit maximisa- tion and ignorant decadence. Japanese music was also reflected in his works but on a less significant scale. Nordgren met his wife Shinobu in Japan, and on their return to Finland in 1973, they settled in the village of Kaustinen in Os- trobothnia, only 45 kilometres from Kokkola, where Juha Kangas had started to teach the violin and build up a children’s orchestra the year before. This little orchestra developed over the years into the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, one of the best string orchestras in the world. From then on, string sounds played a key role in Nordgren’s music, though he always loved the large orchestra. He probably went deeper into this sound world than any of his colleagues around the world, and displayed more fantasy than anyone else. His music for strings, and most of all for string orchestra, is among the most substantial and unequalled in all literature. In the early 1980s, he also adapted the influ- ence of Arvo Pärt, but in a less pure and more liberal manner. And beyond the realms of ‘absolute music’, - 3 - he incorporated extra-musical messages: in the early 1980s, he wrote his only two operas, The Black Monk (after Chekhov; a project originally planned but never realised by Shostakovich) and Alex (an explosive and timelessly relevant “terrorist opera” for TV). Theatre makers have still not become aware of the revolutionary potential of these. Over the years, he wrote several settings of the Kalevala and other Nordic myths, some of them with very exotic instruments. Three fields remain, however, at the core of his output: music for large orchestra (including eight symphonies), music for string orchestra, and chamber music. The first two categories are naturally subdivided into symphonic and concertante music. Nordgren’s solo concertos often pose very virtuosic tech- nical challenges (not only for the soloists), but the aim is never simply to display virtuosity; rather, virtuosity is only a means to an expressive end. It also – and all the more so as time passed – became his habit to differentiate the individual parts in the string orchestra or at least to divide the large groups into smaller units. In his late works he mainly favoured a one-movement format. In this, he resembled his colleague Anders Eliasson, with whom he shared a mutual admiration. Growing up with a stringed instrument (as did his Latvian friend and colleague Pē teris Vasks) is obviously a great advantage for a composer of string music, for it engenders an intuitive ability to find the right sound and to explore the mysteries behind the obvious options with unerring instinct. As to form, music was for Nordgren “a non-representational, quasi abstract narrative”. As in a Dream Op. 21 for cello and piano was composed in 1974 and premiered by Erkki Rautio and Izumi Tateno on the Finnish radio in 1976. The concert premiere was given by Lauri Pulakka (solo cellist in the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra) and Outi Kangas in Kaustinen on 7 December 1985. Juha Kangas was always interested in Nordgren’s whole œuvre, and not only the latest addition, and his arrangement for cello and string orchestra (2017) had two main objectives: to faithfully and distinctly re- produce the abstract structure and to evoke a sound world that is as authentically ‘Nordgrenian’ as possible. And who could have been better suited to the task than the closest friend who premiered many of his works over almost four decades and conducted his music hundreds of times! The microtonal shades in the dense chromaticism are exclusively reserved for the soloist and find no resonance in the orchestra because in the original scoring the cello was accompanied by a piano. The music rises from the persistent longing of the beginning to angular vivacity, only to find its way back to its original state at the end. Some particularly beauti- ful passages afford a lyrical dialogue between the soloist and varying orchestral musicians. The two concertos are among the most wonderful Nordgren ever wrote. They sort of represent opposite poles of his concertante œuvre: the Third Cello Concerto is in four separate, openly contrasting - 4 - movements, whereas the Double Concerto Op. 87 integrates all the contrasts in a single large movement. Nordgren wrote the third of his five cello concertos in 1992 (like the first, it is scored for a string orchestra). It was first performed by Steven Isserlis and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra under Juha Kangas in Kokkola on 12 September 1992. The present release is the second recording of the concerto and was played by the same musicians as in the first.

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