Lost Landscapes

Album review

Conductor Robert Trevino’s fourth album release on Ondine is focused on the late works of composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016), one of Finland’s most celebrated composers after Sibelius and known worldwide for his Neo-Romantic, even mystic compositions. Together with violinist Simone Lamsma and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra the artists are presenting four final orchestral works by the celebrated composer. Two of the works are world première recordings.

In his late period, Rautavaara received several communications from the world’s leading violinists requesting him to write worksfor them. He was able to oblige them, creating several extensive works featuring solo violin. Fantasia (2015) for violin and orchestra is a work of soft Neo-Romantic harmonies and soaring melodic lines. The overall mood is one of pastoral serenity. In 2014, Rautavaara was asked to write a new Violin Concerto. This commission resulted in Deux Sérénades, for violin and orchestra, which remained unfinished at Rautavaara’s death: the second movement was sketched out, but only its beginning was orchestrated. Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), an accomplished composer of symphonies and concertos who studied composition with Rautavaara at the turn of the 1970s, fleshed out the orchestration in 2018. Particularly in the first serenade, Sérénade pour mon amour, the orchestration is achingly beautiful in its unrestrictedly soaring Romantic melodic flow, balancing delicately on the cusp of the warmth of love and the melancholy of farewell.

Lost Landscapes (2005/15) was originally written as a violin sonata, but Rautavaara began orchestrating the work in 2013. The first movement was premiered at the contemporary music festival at Tanglewood in July 2015, but the full premiere of the work took place in Malmö in March 2021, with Simone Lamsma as soloist. In the Beginning (2015) is a concise overture-type work commissioned for a concert opener.

The titles of his works were important for the composer, forming part of the "aura" of the work and often even constituting the initial impulse for writing the piece in the first place. In this case, the composer might have meant a dream or impression of a new beginning in another dimension. Its conclusion is not final but leaves the listener anticipating what might come next. © Ondine