Continuing my short survey of recent portrait discs, a different kind of surprise came from Midnight Sun Variations, a collection of orchestral works by Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. The world première of Midnight Sun Variations, performed at the 2019 Proms by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Storgårds, left me with mixed feelings. Its first half had been impressive, but was let down by a subsequent regression into less original, borderline filmic tropes.
However, its rendition here, by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon (who perform everything on the album), is significantly more convincing and compelling. i’m not sure if Tarkiainen has revised the score, but either way, taken as a whole the work sounds far more cohesive. The way Tarkiainen moves between vague textural notions, strange microtonal bleatings and bursts of lively counterpoint in the first half is highly engaging, while the latter half, coming after a hugely intense climax, now serves to act like a focusing of this varied, more suggestive material, and there are no hints whatsoever of anything filmic.
It’s interesting to hear how this new interpretation dispels the issues i’d had with its first performance – yet unfortunately, the remaining three pieces on the album trigger those same reservations even more strongly.
Songs of the Ice is materially similar, moving between robust, muscular passages littered with loud bass drum thwacks, glistening, tremulous hovering, and periods of contrapuntal liveliness. However, the way these are wielded here feels less like an organic evolution than a more basic switching between them. This has the effect of reducing the music’s power to that of gestures and archetypes rather than something more substantial. Everything starts to sound provisional, inessential and inconsequential, merely what we’re hearing right now which will before long be replaced by one of the other ideas.
As the album continues it becomes clearer that this is the modus operandi of not just this piece but Tarkiainen’s work in general, perhaps trying to find an overall balance between these distinct (disjunct?) ideas. In the cor anglais concerto Milky Ways, featuring soloist Nicholas Daniel, the music is further marred by Tarkiainen’s tendency to tread water and resort to well-worn (worn out?) clichés. It’s at its best in the playful central movement, ‘Interplays’ (though even here it’s a bit too Faberian for comfort), while the final movement’s shift into glittering textural soundscapes feels like a bit of an easy, cheap manouevre, less a resolution of the work’s argument than a simple avoidance of one.
The Ring of Fire and Love, which closes the album, is all too similarly gestural: little florid runs, more glistening and loud thwacks, plus the addition here of fanfare-like material, such that it seems to be entirely made from existing musical bits and pieces from elsewhere. It has an exciting climactic sequence but increasingly we’re in a place oscillating between extremes of heavy and light, big boisterous surges followed by vaguely pretty glistening sequences. Portraits tell us many things about the person, and this one suggests Outi Tarkiainen to be a composer who favours simplistic, superficial and somewhat derivative music, not without beauty or, at times, striking imagination, but nonetheless limited in scope and ambition.
Released last year by Ondine, Midnight Sun Variations is available on CD and download.
