Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
I love this Cantus Arciticus, February 13, 2006
Beautifully evocative, and the birds are magnificent. Lovely music for a harsh era.
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5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The questionable popularity of Cantus Articus, August 1, 2004
Even if Cantus Articus seems to be Rautavaara's most popular work, I do not consider this piece a great one, at least not for the concert performance. It works perfectly as a scene music on Discovery channel or Animal planet, but since there is no fast movement (again) in this work, I find it pretty boring. The melodies are simple and beautiful, and bring Sibelius' Swan of Tuonela in mind, and the recorded sounds of birds are intriguing, but three slow (sluggish!) movements are too much.
Fourth symphony is clearly Rautavaara's most radical composition. Even such composer as Rautavaara cannot achieve beauty with serial techniques. It shows again how the constructivist's methods of the 50-ies and 60-ies of 20th century were doomed to last long.
But the fifth symphony is gorgeus! Even if it again lacks the agility, fortunately Rautavaara had enough artistic strength to create more simple music, but with something new: the orchestral colour, the rises and drops of chords (C major triad is notable) and fragile and haunting beauty make this symphony a memorable one. It looks like Rautavaara had more luck with symphonies of odd numbers and less with even numbers. Maybe on purpose? We'll probably never know.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The standard Rautavaara crowd-pleaser and his most unusual symphony, along with a late disappointment, April 20, 2008
This Ondine disc, a 1996 reissue of a 1990 original, features three rather different works from the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. Max Pommer leads the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra.
The great Rautavaara fad of the late 1990s was based on his many works in a neoromantic vein, and "Cantus Arcticus" for sinfonietta (1972) was the first big success. Subtitled "concerto for birds and orchestra", it pairs the orchestra with recordings of birds made in north Finland above the Arctic Circle. The orchestral writing serves provides subdued and utterly minimal counterpoint to the birds, who in the first two movements are in the spotlight, while in the third both assert themselves toward an elegant climax. The orchestral writing includes some aleatorism, but this is not very noticeable even if one compares different recordings. This Naxos recording is especially admirable for its balance; in other recordings the birds are often too low in the mix. It's a charming piece, and it's no wonder that it has become Rautavaara's most widely performed work. Still, after hearing the piece several times, one begins to notice a lack of substance in the music, which turns out to be common to most of Rautavaara's music written afterward.
The 16-minute and four-movement Symphony No. 4 "Arabescata" (1962) is Rautavaara's only wholesale submission to Darmstadt-style modernism. While the Third was a work of twelve-tone serialism, it ended up sounding mostly like Bruckner. The Fourth, on the other hand, in some of its movements serializes rhythm, dynamics and timbre and resembles Webern or Boulez, while elsewhere it contains highly aleatoric writing and graphical notation. I really like this, actually. It's wacky and wild, but with still somehow identifiably Rautavaara. While it's hard to write more than one work like this, if Rautavaara had permanently integrated these techniques into his compositional toolkit, his music would not have undergone the great stagnation of recent decades.
By the Symphony No. 5 (1985) Rautavaara had begun to seemingly write the same work over and over again. And given moment from this symphony is indistinguishable from the Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth symphonies, "Isle of Bliss", "Garden of Spaces" and so forth. If you hear one of these creations, their triadic harmonies and spicy "dissonances" can be impressive at first, but if you know Rautavaara's oeuvre, they start to disappoint. Of the late Rautavaara, I can recommend only the recording of the Eighth on Naxos, and mostly because it is historically important as the piece which sparked the Rautavaara cult.
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