Introduction

The composers Einoiuhana Rautavaara, Olli Mustonen, and Béla Bartók hail from three different generations and two different countries, yet their works on this program share a common thread: a sense of looking backward towards the past, of being inspired by a national folk identity. How this thread is spun out varies by piece. Bartók’s “Duos” and “Dances” directly quote folk tunes from Eastern Europe; Mustonen’s Sinuhe avoids direct quotation but evokes a folk idiom through its musical language. In contrast, Rautavaara’s Pelimmanit and Bartók’s Divertimento filter past musical forms, techniques, and genres through the lens of twentieth-century neoclassicism. Yet whatever the approach, each of these works entrances, entertains, and enthralls.

Rautavaara:
Pelimannit (“Fiddlers”)

Often hailed as the most important Finnish composer after Sibelius, Einojuhana Rautavaara has created an impressive oeuvre which defies strict categorization. Rautavaara began his career composing in a neoclassical style, a period that lasted throughout the 1950s and includes his first major international break-through, 1954’s A Requiem in Our Time for brass ensemble. Later Rautavaara would experiment with dodecaphony, serialism, and incorporating elements of jazz and romanticism. Composed in 1952, Pelimannit (“Fiddlers”) belongs to his neoclassical period; originally written for piano, Rautavaara arranged it for string orchestra in 1972. Each of the five movements of this imaginative suite is based on a different fiddle tune from a collection by Samuel Rinda-Nikkola, an early nineteenth-century Finnish mystic and folk musician. The work combines neoclassicism with folk elements such as modal harmonies and folky melodic gestures, but also incorporates some surprisingly dissonant cluster chromaticism. The first movement depicts the entrance of the famous fiddlers from Narbö, with all the rustic pomp that it entails. In the eerie second movement, Jonas Kopsin plays his violin all alone in the forest, for himself. For the third movement the action shifts to the village church, where the bell-ringer Samuel Dickström practices organ, improvising fragments of Bach and old wedding tunes. In the gypsy-inflected, polka-like fourth movement, a “melancholy devil” listens to the forest. Finally, the fifth movement is an energetic, driving jumping dance that seems to end almost as soon as it starts.

Olli Mustonen:
Sinuhe

Following in the footsteps of Rautavaara is Olli Mustonen, a Finnish composer who studied with Rautavaara at the Sibelius Academy beginning in 1975. Mustonen now enjoys a thriving career as a pianist and a conductor as well as a composer. His music often draws on previous stylistic idioms, such as quasi-Baroque counterpoint, neo-classical formal balance, or neo-romantic mysticism. Sinuhe exemplifies many of these characteristics. Mustonen originally composed this piece in 2005–6 as a sonata for solo oboe, in part to fulfill his wish to write a piece for his wife Sole, an oboist. Six years later the composer arranged it for two violins and then for violin orchestra, adding a contrapuntal line and incorporating a greater variety of textures and harmonies. In composing Sinuhe, Mustonen was inspired by Sinuhe the Egyptian, a 1945 historical novel by the Finnish author Mika Waltari (1908–1979) about Sinuhe, a doctor living in the 14th century B.C.E. who was the personal physician to Pharaoh Akhenaten before traveling to Crete, Babylon, and many other places. Waltari was in turn inspired by the ancient manuscript The Story of Sinuhe, one of the earliest known literary texts (set in the 20th century B.C.E.). Mustonen’s Sinuhe comprises two movements: a meditative, improvisatory introduction followed by an energetic, irregular quasi-dance movement that keeps returning to the same obsessive chromatic theme. This slow-fast pairing recalls the usual template of many folk dances, such as the Hungarian lassú–friss, a comparison that is heightened by various folky and quasi-Oriental melodic gestures. The two-note stepwise ascending figure that begins the first movement is repeated and transformed throughout the piece, perhaps evoking Sinuhe’s many travels throughout the ancient world.

Béla Bartók:
Duos for Two Violins;
Romanian Folk Dances;
Divertimento for Strings

Like Rautavaara and Mustonen, Béla Bartók was enormously influenced by folk music; in fact, he was one of the first composers to make a serious effort to research and understand authentic folk music, and then to integrate it into his music. Bartók first became interested in the music of the Hungarian countryside in the early 1900s, making his first excursion in 1905 to interview Hungarian folk musicians and notate their melodies. Bartók took many melody-gathering trips over his career, focusing especially on areas in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. He would publish several collections of these tunes and is considered a key innovator in the then-nascent field of ethnomusicology. Yet Bartók’s genius would manifest itself in his compositional activities: not only did he transcribe, arrange, and orchestrate many folk tunes, but he combined their rhythmic, motivic, and harmonic elements with principles of musical modernism to create his own distinctive compositional style. 

Bartók claimed that there were three approaches to setting a folk tune. In the first, the “used folk melody is the more important part of the work. The added accompaniment and eventual preludes and postludes may only be considered as the mounting of a jewel.” In the second, “the importance of the used melodies and the added parts is almost equal.” Finally, in the third, “the added composition-treatment attains the importance of an original work, and the used folk melody is only to be regarded as a kind of motto.” The Romanian Folk Dances and the Forty-Four Duos for Two Violins fall emphatically in the first category. Bartók wrote the Romanian Folk Dances in 1915 for solo piano and arranged them for small orchestra in 1917. Each of the seven dances is based on an instrumental tune collected in Romania between 1910 and 1912. These include a “Stick Dance,” a “Waistband Dance,” a stamping dance literally called “On the Spot,” a “Buciumeana” (or a dance from Bucium), a Romanian polka, and two Măruntels (a couples dance in which the immobile female ignores the man’s energetic dancing, which involves a jump on every fourth beat). The violin duos are also almost all settings of folk tunes from Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian regions; only numbers 35 and 36 are original tunes set in a folk style. Each duo displays a particular character and employs a specific compositional technique, such as variable phrase lengths, additive meter, or hypermetric irregularity.

Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings is not a setting of folk tunes, but rather a fully original product of Bartók’s mature style that reflects the influence of both folk music and musical modernism. Composed in 1939 in a little over two weeks for Paul Sacher’s Basle Chamber Orchestra, the Divertimento hints at the pressures of the impending war in its various moods and characters, from the struggle of the first movement and the melancholy of the second to the wildness of the third. (Indeed, Bartók would flee Europe for good in 1940, living out the rest of his life in the United States.) Yet Bartók filters these serious narrative strands through a lighter neoclassical idiom that draws on musical languages and forms of the past. A generally diatonic harmonic language and frequent opposition between soloists and the full ensemble are, for instance, reminiscent of the Baroque concerto grosso. Moreover, each movement’s structure is based on a classical model: sonata form in the first movement, ternary form in the second, and rondo form in the third. These borrowed musical models and techniques combine with the intensity of the musical material to create an appealing balance of elegance, clarity, imagination, and emotional power.

The first movement of the Divertimento begins with a robust tune in F major with heavy modal inflections. After several variations and metric complexities, this section climaxes in a distinctive unison rhythm on F. This rhythm will recur throughout the movement, interrupting the melodic flow and suggesting a more serious conflict; even the serene second theme in D major is not safe from the rhythmic disruptions. These struggles continue in the development and the recapitulation until a more placid version of the first theme closes the movement in its coda. The melancholy second movement evokes Bartók’s famous “night music” style in its slow-moving, slinky chromaticism and eerie textures. Folk influences soon creep in, including the short-long rhythm characteristic of Hungarian verbunkos music and grace notes and trills that lead to an agonizing climax in the middle of the movement. The music gradually subsides again, returning to the gloom of the opening. The lively third movement shifts back to modal, folk-influenced dance music, once again placing soloists in opposition to the full ensemble. Imitative figures permeate the movement, including a three-voice fugue that culminates in a violin cadenza. The music continues to push and pull, gradually growing wilder and wilder, until the final, emphatic cadence.

—Notes written by Jacob Schafer