NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- When Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara died in 2016, at 87, a voice of rare lyricism in contemporary music fell silent. His death severed a link to the past: Rautavaara had been a protégé of Sibelius, Finlands master composer, and one of the pallbearers at his funeral in 1957. Rautavaaras music, too, conjured the past. Although he entertained some modernist techniques, at its core, his style was seductively, if idiosyncratically, romantic.
This week, he delivered an unexpected posthumous greeting. A new album, Paris, by star violinist Hilary Hahn and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, features two gleaming serenades one addressed to love, the other to life that were the last pieces he wrote. Hahn said that when she heard of their existence, it felt like receiving a letter from the beyond.
We thought there wasnt anything else, she added. And he left us this gift.
The gift was intended for Hahn. In 2014, she had performed Rautavaaras soaring Violin Concerto, written in the 1970s, with the Radio France orchestra. She was so taken by the piece that she told the ensembles Finnish music director, Mikko Franck, that she wanted to commission another concerto from him.
Franck agreed to broach the subject, although he knew Rautavaaras health had been fragile since he suffered a ruptured aorta in 2004. When they spoke, Rautavaara said he did not want to write another concerto but that he was drawn to the idea of a suite of serenades. The conversation ended inconclusively, and Franck and Hahn came to believe the project had fallen victim to Rautavaaras weakened condition. Another work for violin and orchestra, Fantasia, written for Anne Akiko Meyers and completed in 2015, appeared to be his final composition.
After Rautavaaras funeral, his widow, Sinikka, took Franck aside and showed him the manuscript of two serenades for violin and orchestra. Serenade to My Love was complete; for Serenade to Life, the solo violin part had been finished, but the sketches for the orchestra cut off near the end, as if in midsentence. Franck noted that the titles for the pieces were in both Finnish and French; they were clearly intended for Hahn and Francks Paris-based orchestra.
Composer Kalevi Aho, a student of Rautavaaras, completed the orchestration, and in February 2019, Hahn and Franck performed the serenades in Paris. The audience was so quiet throughout the whole premiere, Hahn said. We all felt that these notes will never be new again.
In fact, there are few truly new notes in these unselfconsciously rhapsodic pieces. Rather, they sublimate themes from earlier Rautavaara vocal works, weaving a web of memory and longing. One source he drew on was a set of serenades for a male a cappella choir from the 1970s one of them addressed to beer. The melody of Serenade to My Wife, on a text by Stefan George about the fading glow of late summer, is the blueprint for the searching, self-absorbed solo line in Serenade to My Love.
Its lush despite itself, Hahn said of the music. On the new album, which also features works by Ernest Chausson and Sergei Prokofiev, she plays it with luminous tone and sustained intensity, her part soaring above a string orchestra that swells and falters.
Serenade to Life quotes from Rautavaaras 1991 opera The House of the Sun, a tragicomedy about two Russian aristocrats who die in exile, clinging to dreams of past grandeur. This serenade begins with a slinky and fluid line for the solo violin, complemented by playful woodwinds that give the music an expansive, sociable feel. In the final moments, a frantic, percussive energy takes over and drives the piece to an abrupt ending.
Sinikka Rautavaara said in an email that in this final serenade, the feeling remains that life was too short after all.
Hahn said that in performing a composers last works she felt the weight of responsibility, knowing that we were finishing the things that he had started to say. The premiere, she added, was the end of something, but it also felt like a beginning.
Now the piece is out in the world; its almost like a birth, she said. The entire catalog is there, and it can become this living legacy.
That first performance is the one captured on the new album. Everyone onstage felt the significance, Hahn said. You are completing a composers catalog. There will be no more new notes after this.
© 2021 The New York Times Company