ARTS
In the shadow of the master
Last week I found myself at one of the strangest concerts I have ever been to. It was given by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor (and music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) Sakari Oramo in Helsinki’s University Hall, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Finnish parliament and the beginnings, therefore, of the establishment of Finland as an independent nation, finally achieved in 1918. We were promised a special occasion, and to make it so there was a glass of champagne in the interval and the presentation to the three invited foreign journalists of a goody bag containing some excellent Parliament Coffee.
Yet the atmosphere was hardly what one might call celebratory. The audience of maybe a couple of hundred MPs, partners and supporting staff stood in solemn respect at the entrance of President Tarja Halonen, who began her second six-year term of office on 1 March, and for the bombastic Presidential march (to her credit, she apparently doesn’t like it much). After a long, silent pause during which the radio announcer was apparently reading the news, the parliament’s speaker, Paavo Lipponen, gave a speech which rated a resounding zero on the charisma register. An atmosphere of reverence had been established, and it persisted throughout the ensuing concert.
Which consisted entirely of music by Sibelius. Of course it did. Sibelius is a name all Finns, even MPs, know. His music is the very quintessence of Finnishness, isn’t it? Well, it’s perfectly true that pieces like Karelia, the Kullervo Symphony and Finlandia are overtly nationalistic, but there is far more to him than that. He himself was unhappy to be held up as a symbol of Finnish nationalistic pride. But the assembled company was here to reinforce that view of him, despite the fact that this was a wide-ranging programme, part of what is actually a rare thing in Helsinki, an all-Sibelius series. It consisted of works all composed in 1906, and included the tough, uplifting Third Symphony, the tone poem Luonottar, the bizarre and brief Pan and Echo. All except the Symphony, which benefited both from being the closing work and maybe from the delayed effects of the half-time beverage, were received politely, as though we were applauding the signing of some dull, verbose European Community treaty.
This strange atmosphere, felt also by Oramo (he told me so the next day), raised questions in my mind beyond those relating to the limited musical sympathies of most members of parliament in any country. Should Finnish music really still mean Sibelius, Sibelius and more Sibelius? Do his inheritors feel condemned to walk for ever in his shadow? Do they feel obliged to put into their own music a consciously Finnish flavour in order to fill Sibelius’s shoes? And does the Finns’ enduringly proprietorial attitude to Sibelius serve to prevent wider recognition of his music as being on a par with the greatest music of his era, or was Adorno’s coruscating derision (compounded by implications that his political ideals were close to those of national socialism) nearer the mark? To this last question, at least, I’d reply simply that I believe the Seventh Symphony to be the greatest symphony of its age.
But Sibelius had all but stopped composing by the end of the 1920s, which is to say three quarters of a century ago. Much else was going on, both during his active career and subsequently, and much continues to go on, as my visit to the Finnish Music Information Centre revealed. Composers like Aare Merikanto, Robert Kajanus (the conductor, and Sibelius’s first interpreter of note), Väinö Raitio, Yrjö Kilpinen in his own time; Einar Englund, Joonas Kokkonen, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Usko Merilainen, Aulis Sallinen from a later generation; and any number of post-war figures, people like Kalevi Aho, Kaija Saariaho, Magnus Lindberg, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka Tiensuu, Jouni Kaipainen.
Nevertheless, nobody reading those lists will have noted a figure as enormous as Sibelius. The closest, perhaps, are Saariaho and Lindberg, both of whom cultivate styles and approaches that seem far too internationalist for them to be held up as Sibelius’s successors. It’s certainly difficult to imagine an audience of MPs listening with the same anodyne reverence to Saariaho as they showed to Sibelius last week. And, actually, listening to her work would have been inappropriate. Her music seems to me more French than anything else, with its transparent colours, its flair, its light. Lindberg is European-modernist, or something like. Both are composers for a world in which cultural boundaries have been torn down. Their music is as Finnish as the music of Sir Harrison Birtwistle is British.
Which is not to say that there is no Finnish spirit in their work at all. Oramo, for one, is willing to recognise its presence. He senses it not as something that lies on the music’s surface or in any overt message but as an underlying quality of melancholy and withdrawal, a hint of the introspective darkness which persists, maybe, as a national collective reaction to centuries of oppression and threat, from Sweden, Russia and the Soviet Union. (Small wonder, since they’ve had to be careful about what they say for so long, that Finns can seem so taciturn.) These days, then, Finnish nationalism in music tends to be innate and unselfconscious. National pride is more overtly reflected in the resources with which the Finnish government still, despite recent ominous murmurings, supports the art form. The facts and figures are, to a Brit used to marvelling at the way in which our own institutions live a hand-to-mouth existence, astonishing. There are music schools all over the country, publicly subsidised, designed to encourage the basic musical literacy that sadly our own dear country does not encourage. Every child, however economically disadvantaged, can access these schools, which provide training out of normal school hours. The result is a population that knows how to play, sing and listen, how to get the most out of their music, how to recognise what good music is. They go to concerts, given by orchestras who have to earn only 15 per cent of their running costs themselves, and they have some wonderful halls to go to Helsinki is getting a new one in 2009 to replace Alvar Aalto’s elegant but acoustically disastrous Finlandia Hall. And a disproportionately large number, given Finland’s tiny population, end up by becoming world-class musicians. If it is true that there are no new Sibeliuses among them, it’s also true that he cannot be replaced and does not need replacing. After all, why try to step into someone else’s shoes when your own fit better?
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