Music
Rautavaara - On the Last Frontier
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Modern Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's eerie and moving choral piece, based on Poe's tale of sailors drifting towards the South Pole
Work
Rautavaara : On the Last Frontier
(words by Edgar Allan Poe)
Performers
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Finnish Philharmonic Choir
Leif Segerstam (conductor)
This live recording of the world premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara's On the Last Frontier comes from the Finlandia Hall and is preceded by a short introduction in which both Segerstam and Rautavaara talk about the work.
The appeal of the music, like his best-selling Angel of Light symphony, comes from the combination of eerie beauty and austere, powerful immediacy.
Images of Rautavaara's native Finland often come to mind when listening to his music - forest lakes at dusk, vast glaciers, endless skies and tranquil solitude - though the location of this piece is even colder and more remote, geographically and spiritually. It is based on Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which the composer read as a boy. He still has a tattered 1915 copy of the book.
Poe's story, full of the terrors of the sea, captured his imagination and remained with him, particularly the closing description of a boatload of shipwrecked men drifting towards the South Pole. They find themselves approaching a gigantic curtain of fog which draws them into the unknown...
On the threshold of his 70s when he wrote it, Rautavaara felt that he, too, was approaching a Last Frontier of his own. He returned to the ending of Poe's work, which he describes as a "mystical, almost metaphysical fantasy".
Rautavaara explains that, in his composition, "the fascinating closing pages of the novel form the whole. I could not use Poe's text verbatim for this purpose... it had to be reworked somewhat. It became, in the mouths of the chorus, the core and framework of a longer narrative, around and in between which the orchestra weaves its own rich, colourful texture. Because I already knew the performers at the time I composed the work, I was spurred to write a number of instrumental solos. The orchestra's role is to tell the tale in a way that is beyond the scope of words - but perhaps expresses it better than words are able to."
Rautavaara : On the Last Frontier
(words by Edgar Allan Poe)
Performers
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Finnish Philharmonic Choir
Leif Segerstam (conductor)
This live recording of the world premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara's On the Last Frontier comes from the Finlandia Hall and is preceded by a short introduction in which both Segerstam and Rautavaara talk about the work.
The appeal of the music, like his best-selling Angel of Light symphony, comes from the combination of eerie beauty and austere, powerful immediacy.
Images of Rautavaara's native Finland often come to mind when listening to his music - forest lakes at dusk, vast glaciers, endless skies and tranquil solitude - though the location of this piece is even colder and more remote, geographically and spiritually. It is based on Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which the composer read as a boy. He still has a tattered 1915 copy of the book.
Poe's story, full of the terrors of the sea, captured his imagination and remained with him, particularly the closing description of a boatload of shipwrecked men drifting towards the South Pole. They find themselves approaching a gigantic curtain of fog which draws them into the unknown...
On the threshold of his 70s when he wrote it, Rautavaara felt that he, too, was approaching a Last Frontier of his own. He returned to the ending of Poe's work, which he describes as a "mystical, almost metaphysical fantasy".
Rautavaara explains that, in his composition, "the fascinating closing pages of the novel form the whole. I could not use Poe's text verbatim for this purpose... it had to be reworked somewhat. It became, in the mouths of the chorus, the core and framework of a longer narrative, around and in between which the orchestra weaves its own rich, colourful texture. Because I already knew the performers at the time I composed the work, I was spurred to write a number of instrumental solos. The orchestra's role is to tell the tale in a way that is beyond the scope of words - but perhaps expresses it better than words are able to."
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