Lindberg’s Latest Album Coming Next Week

The end of next week will see the release of the latest Ondine album of compositions by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. As in some (but not all) of the past recordings, these will be performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted, for this album, by Nicholas Collon. As of this writing, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders prior to the release on Friday; but the only purchase option is MP3 download. The good news is that the download also includes two PDF files. One of these is the full 24-page booklet. The other is probably a four-page summary, which includes information about previous Lindberg albums.

My interest in Lindberg goes back well over a decade. According to my archives, my earliest account of his music took place in June of 2008, when Sakari Oramo conducted the San Francisco Symphony in a performance of “Seht die Sonne” (see the sun). However, my interest in Lindberg predates my writing activities. I remember when he visited the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in May of 2011 for a trio performance with cellist Anssi Karttunen and violinist Jennifer Koh. After the intermission, Lindberg came out on stage with Karttunen to announce the celebration of the Finnish equivalent to the Fourth of July, after which they launched into a raucous account of the Finnish national anthem. (One of my Silicon Valley colleagues was Finnish. He came up for the concert and dutifully stood during the anthem performance.)

Cover of the album being discussed

The new album is devoted almost entirely to the viola concerto that Lindberg completed earlier this year. It may be worth reproducing the track listing for this music:

1. 1st movement
2. 2nd movement
3. Trio
4. Quasi Una Cadenza
5. Interlude
6. Cadenza
7. 3rd movement

Since there are no breaks in the performance, the conventional semantics of “movement” are pretty much abandoned. There is an overall flow; and, if there are any “punctuation marks,” they have less to do with overall architecture and more to do with the injection of motifs from past sources. The most prominent of those sources is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 81a, his 26th piano sonata, composed in the key of E-flat major and given the title (by the composer) “Les Adieux.” Whether or not the concerto, in its entirety, is based on a “rhetoric of farewell” is left to the individual listener to decide. The album then concludes with two shorter tracks of works composed in 2020: “Absence” and “Serenades.”

Over the years I have come to appreciate that “making sense” of Lindberg’s music is a process that evolves over the course of multiple listenings. The good news is that the process tends to “spill over” from one Lindberg composition to another. This is worth noting because there will be at least two performances of Lindberg works over the course of the coming season.

The bad news is that we shall have to wait for both of them until spring of next year. The first of these will be performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players as part of their penultimate program in April. That will be the orchestrated (2002) version of “Jubilee,” which was composed for the Ensemble InterContemporain chamber ensemble. Then, towards the end of the following month, the San Francisco Symphony will give its first performances of “Chorale” with Esa-Pekka Salonen on the podium. Writing as one that has consistently believed there there is no such thing as too much Lindberg, I have to confess that I am more than a little impatient!

Perhaps another Lindberg album will be released between now and April.