Leiviskä: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1

Album review

The revival of works by female composers has bypassed the music of Finland's Helvi Leiviskä, perhaps because in her own country, she was never quite forgotten. For non-Finns, however, this release will be something of a revelation, and indeed, it landed on classical best-seller lists in early 2024. Leiviskä (1902-1982) studied during the last creative years of Sibelius, and to judge from these works, it is not wrong to find in her a bridge from that great Finnish composer to the more contemporary era of Finnish music, which has been relatively hospitable to women (Leiviskä, when asked what it was like to be a female composer, replied, "I don't know, because I don't know what it's like to be a male composer"). All three works here have predecessors in Sibelius' writing. The opening Sinfonia Brevis, Op. 30, of 1962, is a complex but tuneful, heavily polyphonic single-movement structure like that of Sibelius' Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105. The Orchestral Suite No. 2, Op. 11, of 1938 is drawn from Leiviskä's score for a 1930s Finnish film called Juha and is vivid program music akin to Sibelius' wonderful incidental music scores. The Symphony No. 2, Op. 27 (1954), stands in the same relation to the other works as Sibelius' symphonies generally did to the rest of its output; its three movements are rather serious and tense, and annotator Eila Tarasti, in her useful notes, suggests that it may refer to the Finnish experience of years of war. Despite all these similarities, Leiviskä's writing is unmistakably of the modern era; the Symphony No. 2 is quite dissonant in places, and in its general mood, it looks forward to Kaija Saariaho as much as it looks back to Sibelius. The performances by Dalia Stasevska and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra are as committed as one could wish, with good balance in the denser polyphonic passages, and the BIS label's sound from the Sibelius Hall is perfectly idiomatic. One looks forward to further volumes of Leiviskä's music from these forces.

© James Manheim /TiVo