This coming Friday Ondine will release its latest album of works by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu. The last time I wrote about this composer was in September of 2018, when Ondine had released a recording of the same resources playing two Lindberg compositions, his second violin concerto, which he completed in 2015, and “Tempus fugit” (time flies), which was composed between 2016 and 2017. The new album presents three much earlier works, all concluded during the final decade of the twentieth century. As usual, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this recording.
Each of these pieces has its own unique approach to resources. The earliest of these, “Marea” (the Italian word for “tide”), is scored for a “sinfonietta-sized orchestra” (according to the booklet notes by Kimmo Korhonen, translated into English by Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, which distinguish the ensemble from a “chamber orchestra”). It was composed between 1989 and 1990. The major work on the album is “Aura – in memoriam Witold Lutosławski,” composed between 1993 and 1994. Consisting of four movements played without interruption, the booklet describes the piece as “a grand synthesis of Magnus Lindberg’s output in the 1990s, and … one of the most prominent monumental orchestral works of its time.” The remaining work was composed much later in the decade in 1997. “Related Rocks” is scored for two pianos, two percussionists, and electronics; and, as can be seen from the booklet photograph of the recording session, requires a conductor:
© Yle, courtesy of Naxos of America
I had not been aware of Lindberg until I made my move from multimedia research in Silicon Valley into honing my skills at writing about music from my new home in San Francisco. That was around the time that Lindberg was appointed composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with his music took place in June of 2008 at a San Francisco Symphony (SFS) subscription concert led by guest conductor Sakari Oramo. The performance was the West Coast premiere of Lindberg’s “Seht die Sonne,” which had been jointly commissioned by SFS and the Berlin Philharmonic (which gave the first performance conducted by Simon Rattle). I suspect that a tacit connection to Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder had something to do with piquing my attention; and after that concert I became hooked on subsequent opportunities to encounter Lindberg’s music, as well as his skills as a performer.
In that context I should confess that my interest in Lutosławski was never that strong. Nevertheless, I have to confess that, once I set about to hone my listening skills, opportunities to listen to his music in concert tended to be more satisfying than I anticipated. When Lindberg began his work on “Aura,” Lutosławski was still alive; and Lindberg had drawn upon a structural strategy developed by Lutosławski to develop the architecture of this large-scale composition. Ironically, Lutosławski died while Lindberg was still working on “Aura,” prompting him to dedicate the work to the Polish composer’s memory.
I would say that, as a listener, I found myself more drawn to Lindberg than I had ever been to Lutosławski. My guess is that the reasons for this attraction have much to do with Lindberg’s capacity for rhetorical devices that both attract and maintain attention. Indeed, that keen sense of rhetoric cuts cleanly across all three of the compositions on this album, all the way down to the composer’s judicious approach to the use of electronics in the most recent of the three compositions. I suspect that this new album is one that I shall be likely to revisit in the future as a reminder of the persuasive powers of Lindberg’s rhetorical skills.
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