Aulis Sallinen: Symphonies 1 & 7

Editorial Reviews
Album Description
Aulis Sallinen certainly ranks with Einojuhani Rautavaara as one of the most important classical composer in today’s Finnish music world. His symphonic music and operas have brought him international renown. His music is far from any and all modern dogmatism, and its candid intensity speaks directly to the hearer. A strictly tonal relation, simple thematic formulas, and clarity of formal construction together with powerful internal tension are the secrets of his popularity. cpo now proposes to honor this composer with a new edition of his Principal Symphonic Works. cpo has invited Aulis Sallinen himself to select the works and to serve as an artistic adviser — thus guaranteeing the highest degree of authenticity! The Symphony No. 7 composed in 1995 is subtitled "The Dreams of Gandalf" because it traces its origins to the planned ballet The Lord of the Rings.

Aulis Sallinen: Symphonies 1 & 7, Music, Aulis Sallinen, Ari Rasilainen, Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, 20th/21st Century Symphony, Classical, Classical Composers, Classical Music, Orchestral, Orchestral & Symphonic, Orchestral Music, Symphonic, Symphony

Average customer rating:

Mixed results from a new Sallinen series

The Beginning of an Important New Sallinen Series

Aulis Sallinen: Symphonies 1 & 7

Manufacturer: Cpo Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Symphonies | Forms & Genres | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music
Modern & 20th Century | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
Similar Items:

Aulis Sallinen: Symphony No. 8; Violin Concerto

Aulis Sallinen: Symphonies 2 & 4; Horn Concerto; Mauermusik

Ahmed Adnan Saygun: Symphony No. 4; Violin Concerto; Suite

Ahmed Adnan Saygun: Symphonies 3 & 5

Ivanovs: Symphonies Nos. 8 & 20

ASIN: B0000DB4YD
Release Date: 2003-11-18

Album Description

Aulis Sallinen certainly ranks with Einojuhani Rautavaara as one of the most important classical composer in today's Finnish music world. His symphonic music and operas have brought him international renown. His music is far from any and all modern dogmatism, and its candid intensity speaks directly to the hearer. A strictly tonal relation, simple thematic formulas, and clarity of formal construction together with powerful internal tension are the secrets of his popularity. cpo now proposes to honor this composer with a new edition of his Principal Symphonic Works. cpo has invited Aulis Sallinen himself to select the works and to serve as an artistic adviser — thus guaranteeing the highest degree of authenticity! The Symphony No. 7 composed in 1995 is subtitled "The Dreams of Gandalf" because it traces its origins to the planned ballet The Lord of the Rings.

Customer Reviews:

Mixed results from a new Sallinen series.......2005-06-25

For too long, Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen's major orchestral works have been served almost exclusively by a series of recordings on BIS that are beginning to show their age. Given this, it is good to see the estimable CPO label starting their own series of Sallinen recordings under the baton of the composer's countryman Ari Rasilainen.

This first volume in the Sallinen series sensibly matches two recent works with two major orchestral scores from the composer's early maturity, helping the newcomer to the composer to see two different styles while bringing the two recent works to the catalog for the first time.

The two comparatively early works date from the early 1970s. Chorali, a work for wind band, and Sinfonia (now known as the First Symphony) are both tightly structured one-minute pieces lasting just under fifteen minutes. Though the example of Sibelius' Seventh Symphony hangs clearly over both works, they are obviously the work of a composer with a distinctive style--one that also shows similarities to Britten, Nielsen, Shostakovitch and even Lutoslawski. Indeed, the symphony is a particularly impressive achievement, gaining considerable cumulative tension over its fourteen-minute duration.

Sadly, I am not entirely convinced by the performances of these two works. Kamu (in the symphony) and Berglund (in Chorali) on the old BIS recordings manage readings of considerably greater tension, and though CPO's modern digital sound is a distinct improvement on the 1970s BIS recording, it is the earlier readings that I will be returning to for these pieces.

Rasilainen and his orchestra seem better suited to the more recent works, which adopt a considerably more relaxed idiom--less tightly structured and less harmonically dense. A Solemn Overture (King Lear) was written in 1997 as a study for an opera of the same name, and takes Sallinen's recent simplified style almost to extremes. The musical language is very conservative, though never anodyne, and the music is successful in a straightforward, uncomplicated manner, if not necessarily as deep and intense as a King Lear-related work might be expected to be.

Like the Overture, the Seventh Symphony is in one movement with a literary basis, though in this case it is based on music for an abandoned 'Lord of the Rings' ballet, and again this work's musical style is comparatively simple by comparison with many of the earlier symphonies. Lasting about twenty-five minutes, it is in an episodic one-movement structure, with much dancelike music in amongst fanfares, slower, sparser sections and occasional surprisingly dissonant writing. This certainly isn't music on the same level as the Fifth ('Washington Mosaics') Symphony, but it has grown on me with time.

Overall, this disc will be more one for the already convinced than newcomers to the composer (the follow-up CPO disc with the 8th Symphony and Violin Concerto would be a far superior starting-point), but fans will be glad to hear it.

The Beginning of an Important New Sallinen Series.......2003-12-24

When setting out to write a review of this disc I've been a bit daunted because I keep finding more things to admire. I consider Aulis Sallinen (b. 1935) to be, with Rautavaara, one of the great living Finnish composers. His voice is almost instantly recognizable and it speaks directly to me with its ceremonial solemnity mixed with mastery of impressionistic and magical orchestration. His music is obviously influenced by that of his Finnish predecessor, Sibelius. Although completely tonal it does not tend to partake of the faux-medieval religiosity of some other Baltic or Scandinavian composers; this is music of the present. Still, it frequently has a mythic quality. This disc, containing four works--two of them [Solemn Overture; Seventh Symphony] unfamiliar to me--helps confirm the impression of greatness. Added to that are the marvelous performances by the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz led by Ari Rasilainen under the direct supervision of the composer. Rasilainen had been known to me for his significant series of excellent recordings of the orchestral music of Kurt Atterberg. He and his orchestra do not disappoint here.

The first and last pieces on the disc are the most recently composed. 'A Solemn Overture (King Lear)', Op. 75 and the Seventh Symphony date from the late 1990s. The Overture, a recomposition of music from his latest opera, 'King Lear,' is an eleven-minute piece not specifically intended as a preface to the opera itself. It is based on four themes, the first three of which are harmonically related. Each theme is played twice during the composition. The thematic argument is interrupted repeatedly by a fanfare figure. Fittingly, the overall tone, as in the opera, is inexorably tragic. The 25-minute, one-movement Seventh Symphony started life as music for a never-realized ballet based on Tolkien's 'The Hobbit,' hence its subtitle, 'The Dreams of Gandalf.' It does not depict specific events in the story but intends to evoke, according to the composer, 'the reading experience and transfers the literary atmosphere and poetry into a musical expression.' Generally the harmonic language is more advanced--sometimes even congested and portentous--than in earlier music by Sallinen, but there is also the quasi-medieval use of dancing Provençal flute and drum (galoubet-tambourin). Sallinen also says that he makes use some medieval Finnish folksongs. The composer's magical use of shimmering harp and tuned percussion is also very much in evidence.

The 14-minute, one-movement First Symphony, written in about 1970, already has the composer's unmistakable fingerprints. Using a Sibelian method of organic development of tiny motifs there is, for the first time in his music so far as I know, the use of bells, so typical of Sallinen's work, against flashes of piccolo, trudging lower strings, upper string interjections, harp, intoning brass. This characteristic combination appears again and again in later Sallinen--most effectively in the Fifth Symphony where it is within the context of independently moving, dreamlike planes of sonority--and is, for me, intensely evocative.

Still one of my favorite of all of Sallinen's orchestral works is his eleven-minute, one-movement'Chorali' ['Chorales'; 1971]. It was given a spectacular reading by Paavo Berglund and the Helsinki Philharmonic on a BIS recording that also contained the First Symphony. I think the present recording, a couple of minutes shorter than Berglund's, makes an even better case for this composition. For wind and percussion ensemble, it occupies the same sound world as Rautavaara's 'Cantus Articus,' which it antedates. Indeed, the main theme (an Ohrwurm if there ever was one) is a striking oboe figure (falling third, falling fourth--C A B-flat F) that is eerily similar to the plaintive birdcall in that latter piece. Moving slowly, dreamily, this work is a wind-band masterpiece. It is no wonder it has been taken up by many such groups the world over.

The recorded sound is excellent, the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, not always the most suave group, plays expertly here. I have great hopes for this ongoing series and will eagerly await subsequent issues.

Strongest recommendation.

Scott Morrison

Music Review: