Concert review | The winner of the Kaija Saariaho organ composition competition composed an eco-catastrophe

The Radio Symphony Orchestra at Musiikkitalo on Friday, conducted by Olari Elts. The choir of the music house. Jan Lehtola, organ. Pingoud, Perotti, Mendelssohn, Maxwell Davies.

The music house the choir sings with aa-aa syllables A day of anger-, Dies irae – melody. Ville Urponen sits at the organ’s fixed playing table, participating from there Olari Eltsin led by the Radio Sinfoniaorkester to the soaring interpretation of the Finnish By Ernest Pingoud From Dance Macabre. The multifaceted dance of death from 1918 is now possible to play on the listener’s ears without sparing his mind.

Nils Schweckendiek too coached by the Musiikkitalo choir, there has been more tone. Dies iraeta is flashed with good tunes as death moves on to the next person. The orchestra, on the other hand, impressively flashes its color palette in all its shades, always taking a new victim into the vortex of the dance of death.

Abundant a hundred years after the completion of Pingoud’s composition, a young Italian musician, enthusiastic about the organ Federico Perotti (b.1993) sat for a couple of years by his composition inspired by trees, because Kaija Saariaho -we were looking for new works for the organ competition. In the spring of 2023, Perotti’s organ concerto Essence awarded the first prize Tomi Räisänen with. Member of the jury of the organ competition and participated in the Musiikkitalo organ procurement project Jan Lehtola already knew he wanted to call Essence self.

When the moment came in September 2024, there was a break in the history of music. Light did not emerge, darkness did. Apocalypse. Eco-catastrophe can also be composed.

This language is easy to understand but hard to hear. The wind knocks on the oak tree indeed, there is the commotion of the food processor in the forest, and the lament of the trees could be heard from the orchestra as time ticked inexorably forward. The clear-sounding resistance of the organ was unaffected.

Also Fir pitch -part, Jan Lehtola’s organ tried to create another world with upper-tone multiples and micro-intervals. The tone made with an air machine for a short chorale not only evoked chords but also tears.

To the third i can To the concert in the shade of a chestnut treethe composer said that he made his own miniature concerto. The wild concoction of melodic pieces successfully describes our time, which is pulsating frantically. As a counterbalance, we heard the wail of the dead, or any living thing that had just been destroyed, played by Lehtola. In the end, the orchestra went on ecstatically to the end of the world; the goers can hear, but they can only recover when the end comes.

Olari Elts, the Radio Symphony Orchestra, organist Jan Lehtola and composer Federico Perotti did what they could in our time. It is up to us to listen and act.

Interim after that, two compositions inspired by Scotland were heard. Felix Mendelssohn third symphony Scottish mixed by Peter Maxwell Davies An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise remind us that skilled composers always reflect something of the time or environment in which they lived.

With the moving symphony, we got to the moors of Ylämaa, among other things, to follow the joyful progress of the horse and dog troupes in the vivace non troppo part.

The latter, on the other hand, lightened the atmosphere, taking the listeners to follow the wedding celebration in folk style, where the drinks started to take their toll. The bagpipe player who stepped onto the stage from the crowd at the end and woke up the orchestra Robert Jordan brought about a much-needed movement in posture.