New Yorker Extolls the Virtues of Nordic Music
The long-awaited New Yorker review of the Cincinnati Symphony's Carnegie Hall concert is finally out and there's not much "there there." Writer Alex Ross, in the February 14-21, 2005 issue focuses his laser-like gaze more on the Finnish phenom, Osmo Vänskä, and the recent tsunamai-like wave of Nordic Music prevalent in the New York City area.
"...Meanwhile, Järvi’s son Paavo led the Cincinnati Symphony in an all-Nordic program at Carnegie...
"You don’t need a degree in geopolitical musicology to understand why the Nordic countries have acquired such disproportionate dominance. They have paid for it fair and square. Finland, most notably, views music as a national pastime, not as an élite pursuit, and it has designed a music-education system that may be the best in the world. The country’s avidity for classical music, and not just of the imported variety, is rooted in the singular phenomenon of Sibelius, who assisted in the forging of the Finnish nation, and whose personal style radically renewed musical language while maintaining a powerful hold on the average listener’s imagination. The fact that Sibelius’s face appeared on the hundred-markan bill encapsulates this synergy of the economic and the artistic.
"Finnish composers long ago stopped imitating Sibelius, but they are still indirectly influenced by his sense of sonority and space. Vänskä and the Lahti recently recorded Rautavaara’s Eighth Symphony—a not quite believable but immensely seductive geography of Romantic sound, in which long, songful, freely flowing phrases reach out for worlds that are long gone and perhaps never were. Sallinen, too, is up to Symphony No. 8, which the Cincinnati Symphony played at Carnegie. If Rautavaara is a dreamer, Sallinen is an ironist, an elegist, a dealer in lyric fragments. His Eighth is a shadowy, thinned-out landscape populated by a few sadly dancing figures."...
So THERE!
Alex Ross blogs at The Rest Is Noise.
"...Meanwhile, Järvi’s son Paavo led the Cincinnati Symphony in an all-Nordic program at Carnegie...
"You don’t need a degree in geopolitical musicology to understand why the Nordic countries have acquired such disproportionate dominance. They have paid for it fair and square. Finland, most notably, views music as a national pastime, not as an élite pursuit, and it has designed a music-education system that may be the best in the world. The country’s avidity for classical music, and not just of the imported variety, is rooted in the singular phenomenon of Sibelius, who assisted in the forging of the Finnish nation, and whose personal style radically renewed musical language while maintaining a powerful hold on the average listener’s imagination. The fact that Sibelius’s face appeared on the hundred-markan bill encapsulates this synergy of the economic and the artistic.
"Finnish composers long ago stopped imitating Sibelius, but they are still indirectly influenced by his sense of sonority and space. Vänskä and the Lahti recently recorded Rautavaara’s Eighth Symphony—a not quite believable but immensely seductive geography of Romantic sound, in which long, songful, freely flowing phrases reach out for worlds that are long gone and perhaps never were. Sallinen, too, is up to Symphony No. 8, which the Cincinnati Symphony played at Carnegie. If Rautavaara is a dreamer, Sallinen is an ironist, an elegist, a dealer in lyric fragments. His Eighth is a shadowy, thinned-out landscape populated by a few sadly dancing figures."...
So THERE!
Alex Ross blogs at The Rest Is Noise.
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