Especially prominent at this year’s Musica Nova festival was the lavish organ in Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo concert hall, unveiled at the start of 2024. The largest modern concert hall organ in the world, its construction was partly made possible by one of Finland’s greatest composers, the late Kaija Saariaho, who in 2017 donated one million euros, nearly a quarter of the total cost of the project. Saariaho’s involvement no doubt ensured the instrument would have relevance for contemporary music, including among other things microtonal and electronic capabilities. Quite apart from its phenomenal sound, the design is gorgeous, with pipe-like tendrils spilling out from the wind chest and the hall itself, as if part-instrument, part-exotic plant.
This wonderful instrument was included in several concerts, two of which featured French organist Thierry Eschaich. There’s an important distinction to be made when considering concert organists: some are serious composers, some are showmen, and there can be little doubt that Eschaich’s talents are emphatically the latter. He’s effectively a very able pastiche-monger, someone who treats composers like so many organ stops, switching them on and off on a whim, demonstrated most clearly at his solo improvisation recital. Improvisation has of course always been an essential component in the organist’s toolbox, but it was impossible not to reflect on the fact that, a century ago, the main protagonists of the French organ school – Widor, Guilmant, Vierne, Langlais, Tournemire, Messiaen, and the rest – all sounded like themselves when they improvised, not like earlier composers. Whereas Eschaich didn’t so much sound like himself as, as the mood took him, Widor, Guilmant, Vierne, Langlais, Tournemire, Messiaen, and the rest.
Whether or not this matters is a judgement call. There were times when Eschaich was undeniably impressive, particularly in a Paraphrase improvised on Ramus virens olivarum which found him sounding like Tournemire in much the same way as Penderecki’s later symphonic music sounds like Mahler: highly polished and plausible, and hard not to enjoy. The treatment of the organum was nicely handled, and its final progression from complex climax to a gentle, glittering conclusion was especially effective. Likewise a Symphonic poem improvised on two themes by Kaija Saariaho, which utilised the bells within the organ. This, and the improvisation’s tone of melodrama, more than once suggested the world of Wurlitzers, but the microtonal passages were engrossing, as was a delicious sequence of Shepard tone-like crescendos. Culminating in an ecstatic high point – tune above, crashed out chords below – there was a real sense of abandon here, in the process coming closest to suggesting what Eschaich might sound like if he stopped trying to ape other composers. As for the rest, his Prelude and fugue improvised on Lampaanpolska was suggestive of a Vierne organ symphony with some Naji Hakim thrown in at the end of its rambunctious fugue, while the sources for his Four improvised city portraits – New York, Vienna, St Petersburg, Paris – were exactly what anyone could have predicted, jazz for New York, Léhar for Vienna, and so on.
Another work of Eschaich’s, Quatre visages du temps for organ and orchestra, was performed later in the festival (with himself as soloist) with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nathanaël Iselin. Here, film music was a more consistent reference point for Eschaich’s pastiche, though the music was primarily obsessed with more stylistically neutral rushing, flourishing and wild bombastic nonsense, with little effort spent trying to make the organ and orchestra actually gel. The third movement worked as a strange, unsettled soundscape, but the type of exuberance in the finale was like having an extrovert unleash at you for 10 minutes.
Disappointing stuff, though it was to some extent mitigated by the rest of the concert. The first part of Catherine Lamb‘s portions transparent / opaque, ‘skin/shimmer’, was given what seemed at first a startlingly passive performance, with Iselin going out of his way to make as it inaudible as humanly possible (i was sitting literally next to the stage; i struggled). As i’ve noted previously, the revised and expanded version of portions transparent / opaque, at its first performance at the Proms in 2023, struck me as less effective than its earlier incarnation, premièred nine years earlier. This muted rendition of the first movement certainly didn’t alter that opinion, yet in his determination to thwart everyone’s basilar membranes, Iselin actually managed to make it sound more tantalising than ever, kind of ‘passively active’. In that sense it was a partial success; at her best, Lamb manages to recalibrate our hearing, and that was certainly the case on this occasion; if someone had dared to drop a pin, all of our eardrums would surely have exploded.
Symphony No. 1 by Olli Koskelin, a first performance, was a curious hot mess, though it had some intriguing moments. Koskelin certainly didn’t waste any time getting going, with instantly worked-up material leading into less intense, layered music that took on a dark, lyrical aspect. However, this telling opening felt let down by what followed. Either the ideas were repetitive and overworked, lingered upon for far too long, or they evolved and transformed so quickly that nothing seemed important (transient shouldn’t imply insignificant). Too much of its material lacked a cogent sense of identity, and in the longer term the symphony took on an arbitrary quality, as if its 11 movements were being played in shuffle mode. While Lara Poe‘s new orchestral piece Kun usva helisee (another world première) lacked the scope and power of some of her recent work – especially the dazzling song cycle Laulut maaseudulta, which i explored last year – it displayed an interesting approach to colour, dark hued but not dark music, as if something akin to radiance were trying to break through. It was at its best when the textural complexity increased (before, it seemed to be treading water), though in general was surprisingly conservative in its language, and as a whole sounded rather insubstantial. However, that in itself suggested something in its favour; when it ended, after about eight minutes, it felt like it had barely got going, and i for one would have been keen to hear a lot more of where it might go next. Less a success than a promising start; perhaps Poe might expand it in the future.
For his organ recital, Jan Lehtola set out to explore many of the possibilities of the Musiikkitalo organ, in a two-hour motherlode focusing on three of the winners in the solo category of the new International Kaija Saariaho Organ Composition Competition, with each work receiving its first performance. Zacharias Ehnvall‘s Multiplicité was the most challenging of them, with a completely baffling sense of continuity. What connected it all? What did it all add up to? Though Luc Antonini‘s Sonate was also tough to keep track of at times, it proved compelling in the way it a convincing sense of narrative emerged from its fractured episodic structure. Winds Choreography by Yves Balmer was a staggering demonstration of raw power, transforming the instrument into the semblance of a caged wild animal. Its convolution was fascinating, with some lovely intricate passagework, but it was impossible to escape from its enormity, attaining massive levels of overload.
The second half was a lot, literally, to take in, filled as it was with no fewer than seven substantial works, all premières, though the extent to which they showed off the instrument’s capabilities was often spectacular. Alejandro Olarte‘s Fragmented Time-Étude for Computer-Controlled Organ both showed the organ acting semi-independently of the performer. Initially he created a super-rapid blur of notes apparently emanating from much slower material performed by Lehtola, later not seeming to need an organist at all, setting the instrument off on its own, wildly contrasting, musical drama. This half of the concert began and ended with Maija Hynninen‘s Voyager 1, performed twice, with and without electronics. The latter turned out to be the more engaging version, with a greater sense of focus and intent. What was most effective was the melding of organ and electronics, to the extent that it was often impossible to tell which sounds came from which source. It was appropriate that the most compelling music of the evening originated with Kaija Saariaho, in the form of an Etude for organ & lights interactions devised by Lehtola. Based on the first movement of Saariaho’s 2014 work for organ and orchestra, Maan varjot, it served as an enticing glimpse into, and evocation of, the wonders of that beautiful piece, its playful electroacoustic textures sympathetically embellished in the hall with computer-controlled coloured lights and patterns created in real-time.
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra concert is available to stream via the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE as both video and audio.
