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Concert review YORKSHIRE POST, 24. November 2003
Record reviews, GRAMOPHONE, Volume 81 Number 973, 2003
Record review, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, September/October 2003
Record review, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, September/October 2003
YORKSHIRE POST, 24. November 2003
Patric Standford
Tapiola Chamber Choir
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Huddersfield Town Hall
Over the last few years, visits to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival of choirs from Scandinavia and the Baltic countries never fail to make a profound impression.
The Tapiola Chamber Choir from Helsinki was all that we have come to expect or those strong, versatile and enthusiastic vocal traditions. Its programme of Finnish choral music began and ended with music by Kaija Saariaho, one of the country’s most imaginative and innovative composers.
The two pieces demonstrated the considerable change in her musical language, the earlier piece of 1979 being full of abrupt hyperactive noses to support a text consisting entirely of a list of Finnish first names, from Aadolf to Yrjö. But in her Tag des Jahrs, settings made in 2001 of letters by Hölderlin, the juxtaposition of gently woven chordal textures with a sensitively made tape of natural sounds proved entrancing.
The choir’s composer-in-residence, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, is someone who we will certainly see much more of soon, and richly deserved his wider exposure will be.
His Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae is a setting in Latin of a report of the tragic wreck of the Estonia ferry in 1994, and a Requiem for the 800 lost lives, a rich and hauntingly beautiful piece of choral writing.
Fascinating too were the belllike patterns in Urmas Sisask’s Kalevala settings written in 1994 for the Tapiola Chamber choir, whose conductor Hannu Norjanen is clearly a powerful stimulus to its impressively impeccable standards.
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 GRAMOPHONE, Volume 81 Number 973, 2003
Guy Rickards
MÄNTYJÄRVI
Salvat 1701
Jukka Voutilainen spkr Official; Olli Tuominen spkr Priest; Tarja Siimes spkr Woman; Tuuli Lindeberg sop Sanna Kurki-Suonio mez Topi Lehtipuu ten Jyrki Korhonen bass Tapiola Chamber Choir / Hannu Norjanen
Alba NCD18 (67 minutes: DDD)
Text and translation included
MÄNTYJÄRVI
‘Eclectica’
Pseudo-Yoik. Four Shakespeare Songs. More Shakespeare Songs. El Hambo. Psalm 150 in Grandsire Triples. Psalm 150 in Kent Treble Bob Minor. Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae. Kouta
Tapiola Chamber Choir / Hannu Norjanen
Finlandia 092741563-2
(69 minutes: DDD)
Texts and translations included
A wonderfully contrasted pair of discs showcasing one of Finland’s finest choirs and a noted choral composer.
Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (b1963) is something of a phenomenon in modern Finnish music. The influences on his tonal language range from Finnish folk music to the Muppet Show by way of everything in between. Timpanist, pianist, conductor and translator, he is a member (and Composer-In-Residence) of the excellent Tapiola Chamber Choir and features on both discs.
Salvat 1701 is by some way his largest work to date. It sets 13 motets from the Finnish ‘Old’ Hymnal of 1701, interspersed with short sections of declamatory narration. Together, these tell of the calamitous decade following the Hymnal’s publication: the outbreak of the Great Northern War which broke Sweden’s Nordic hegemony and brought disease and famine in its wake. The fictional mise-en-scène has survivors crowding unwisely into a Helsinki church (half of the city’s then tiny population would eventually perish) only to find themselves caught between the deficiencies of both Church and State.
The music plays rather like the accompaniment to a modern mystery play, though the work’s musical resolutions and climaxes compel the attention in their own, muted way. The cantata is beautifully served by Alba’s resonant recording made in Roihuvuori Church, Helsinki (the location for the bulk of Finlandia’s disc).
Prior to Salvat 1701, Mäntyjärvi’s largest work seems to have been Kouta (1996), a 17-minute setting for chorus and small orchestra of one of Eino Leino’s folk epics. It’s a weighty conclusion to a disc which celebrates Mäntyjärvi’s bewildering diversity. Who would have thought he would be such a sensitive setter of Shakespeare? Yet the two sets of
Shakespeare Songs (dating from 1984 and 1997) are magical. Their idiom is traditional compared to the riotous high-jinks of Pseudo-Yoik (1994) and El Hambo (1996), loosely based on Lapp and Swedish stereotypes (the texts are
nonsense). If these confirm Mäntyjärvi's often whimsical humour, his two exuberant settings of Psalm 150 (1998-9), employing British change-ringing methods, showcase his technical mastery and imagination in equal measure.
Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae (1997) is a most moving elegy for the victims of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994.
The Tapiola Chamber Choir (to which Mäntyjärvi himself belongs) sings magnificently. Both recordings are of demonstration class and are strongly recommended to lovers of mainstream as well as unusual choral repertoire: you have a real treat in store.
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 AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, September/October 2003
Lindsay Koob
SIBELIUS: Choral Songs, all
Tapiola Chamber Choir, Friends of Sibelius / Hannu Norjanen; Tapiola Choir / Kari Ala-Pollänen
Finlandia 19054 [2CD] 147 minutes
This double-disc release, as far as I can tell, offers the only available collection of the complete choral music of Jean Sibelius (72 pieces in an, many of them unpublished), including pieces written for female and children’s voices.
If you wish to acquire it, you must know that is supplied as part of a three-disc “Jubilee Box” (apparently celebrating Finlandia’s 20th year in the business) bearing the above number in parentheses. The third disc is a separate collection of Krzysztof Penderecki’s complete sacred works (up to 1992) for a cappella chorus that has already been reviewed in these pages (J/A 1996).
As I’ve heard only a few examples of Sibelius’s unaccompanied choral music in mixed collections (Finnish Choral, N/D 2002), this treasure-trove came as an especially welcome surprise. As I commented in my earlier review, Sibelius’s choral efforts come across as somewhat simpler in conception and structure than his orchestral work. After listening to 2-1/2 hours of it, that observation is strongly reinforced. It’s almost as if there are two different Sibeliuses: one writing complex and ethereal absolute orchestral music for international posterity and the other producing mostly folk-flavored or directly utilitarian vocal music of lesser sophistication for domestic use and enjoyment. But there were overriding practical reasons for such uncharacteristic simplicity, chief among them the primitive state of 19th Century domestic choral singing. While Finland had a strong folk-song tradition, the nation - until well into the following century - lacked anything resembling the continental European choral tradition. Neither did they have any choirs trained even remotely close to European standards of skill and refinement. Existing ensembles could manage only the simplest of harmonies and rhythms. Carl Nielsen faced the same problem in Denmark.
Finnish folk tunes often employed then-complex rhythmic patterns, such as 5/4 and 7/4. Folk specialists could handle them, either solo or in tiny ensembles; but Sibelius’s, early arrangements of some of them were simply beyond the capabilities of most existing choirs. For example, the first of his four arrangements of ‘Rakastava’ (Beloved) - next to ‘Finlandia’, his best-known choral work - could only be performed by the Helsinki University Chorus, and even then only with the aid of a hastily-added string accompaniment to keep the singers on pitch.
Sibelius’s choral works were pioneering movement attempts to move beyond the basic German and Swedish traditions,
in that they were the first formal compositions to set Finnish texts. Most important among them were his settings from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, and the Kanteletar, a companion volume of Finnish lyrical folk-poetry. These, together with his patriotic settings - written after Czar Nicholas II’s “Russification” attempts in 1899, - did much to foster Finnish cultural awareness and lend impetus to their hastily organized national resistance movement. These works also assured Sibelius’s stature as Finland’s beloved national composer.
Aside from these nationalist pieces, his choral works fall into a quite a few other categories; personal tributes to friends or notable citizens, songs for festivities or ceremonial purposes, pieces in Swedish for the nation’s most significant minority, Christmas carols, a few sacred and liturgical works, and songs for children.
Performances are mostly a cappella, though some include piano, limited percussion, or even church bells. The most excellent Tapiola Chamber Choir (see Mäntyjärvi, this issue) performs flawlessly, together with the Friends of Sibelius, as the conductor chose to call the group of singers reinforcing them in some pieces. The Tapiola Choir is perhaps Finland’s best-known children’s choir, and their sweet singing here is a treat. Notes and texts are comprehensive, well translated, and nicely laid out.
While I enjoyed this collection,from beginning to end, it was a challenge to listen to it all at once. While few, if any, of these pieces can be described as bad music, most them simply lack the kind of intellectual depth and imagination that have endeared the rest of Sibelius’s music to generations of listeners. But much of it, while insubstantial, is still rather lovely, flavored with cool Nordic spirit and occasional melancholy. It will appeal strongly to followers of national folk traditions - and, of course, to Scandinavian music fans.
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AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, September/October 2003
Lindsay Koob
MÄNTYJÄRVI: Salvat 1701
Tapiola Chamber Choir / Hannu Norjanen
Alba 18 - 66 minutes
The Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (b 1963) is also a semi-professional choral singer and conductor, whose recent appointment as the Tapiola Chamber Choir’s composer-in-residence gave rise to this fascinating piece. It is the first substantial work I’ve heard from him, though I’ve covered two performances of his genuinely funny miniature, Pseudo-Yoik, in recent issues (Finnish Choral, N/D 2002 and Voice of Africa, last issue).
The composer, in his own excellent notes, describes Salvat 1701 as a “semi-dramatized concert, or choral drama, or perhaps a hymn-oratorio”, based mainly on the Finnish Old Hymnal of 1701. But that hymnal - the first to be widely used by the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church - contains mostly Swedish and German tunes (including many familiar to me). He therefore also incorporated Finnish folk-hymns from later editions of the hymnal to lend the piece more native flavor.
The work's dramatic scenario is based on actual historical events. Finland, in the first decade of the 18th Century, was suffering from the combined ravages of protracted famine and war, compounded by an outbreak of the plague in 1710. The choir is cast as a desperate band of village folk, gathered in the church of Helsinki - then a tiny town - to seek communal strength and consolation through prayer and hymn-singing.
There are spoken roles as well: a government official carries on a bureaucratic tirade of useless precautions to be taken against the epidemic, while the local vicar preaches both divine vengeance on sinners and salvation for the righteous. But both voices are repeatedly silenced by the simple faith and spiritual yearning of the afflicted townspeople, as they persist in singing their hymns.
The music is mostly direct and simple: time-honored, comfortable hymn-tunes - probably the only formal music then known to rural Finns. It is designed - and performed - to convey something of the rustic, raucous hymn-singing style of the day, reminiscent of our own American shape-note singing. But Mäntyjärvi’s treatment of the old tunes lends a certain timeless quality to the music. He adds realistic folk-touches like deep droning from the men’s voices, keening obbligato wails from the women, and repetitive rhythmic chanting underlying the basic hymn-tunes and simple harmonies. He keeps the endless verses and refrains of the hymns from getting monotonous by tossing them back and forth among the sections of the choir and soloists. He uses just enough modern musical language to keep the music from sounding completely dated.
The net result is a totally different kind of quasi-religious experience: it offers a kind of object lesson in the futility of official intervention in times of disaster or “divine wrath”. But, more important - to paraphrase the composer - it also celebrates the instinctive human need for closeness, for communal gathering and abasement before a higher power in the face of disaster and anguish. It further celbrates the supremacy of the human voice as a vehicle for the expression of such needs.
The wonderful Tapiola Chamber Choir performs splendidly, with great subtlety, power, and conviction. Although this fairly simple music hardly gives them the chance to display everything they are capable of, their stunning sound and hard-hitting emotional powers could only be the work of a master choir.
This is a work that can convey its intended effect only to native Finns. Neither the comfortable familiarity of the centuries-old hymn tunes nor the effect of the language can be fully felt by anybody else. Nevertheless, I fell head-over-heels into its bleak, yet finally hopeful spell, and emerged both deeply shaken and reassured at its end. It might not be every choral fan’s cup of tea, but don’t hesitate to give it a try. You’ve probably never heard anything quite like it.
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