Rautavaara's "Angels"

Synopsis

Do you believe in Angels?

It seems the late Finnish composer Einojuhanni Rautavaara did – and produced a number of orchestral pieces with evocative titles like Angels and Visitations or Angel of Light. One of these, a concerto for double-bass and orchestra titled, Angel of Dusk, had its premiere performance on today's date in 1981, in Helsinki.

“Looking out the window of a plane,” writes Rautavaara, ”I saw a strikingly shaped cloud, gray but pierced with color, rising above the Atlantic horizon. Suddenly, the words Angel of Dusk came to mind.” When Rautavaara was asked to write a double-bass concerto he recalled the vision of the cloud and had his title.

In an interview, Rautavaara spoke of a scientist who wrote that ‘the existence of music is an intellectual scandal’. Rautavaara explained, “With that he meant that there is a message in music, and yet there are no words for that message. It’s from another world. For a scientist that is a scandal. For me, it’s a wonderful thing.”

“In the end, I agree with Carl Jung,” said Rautavaara. “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928 - 2016) Angel of Dusk Olli Kosonen, double bass; Finnish Radio Symphony; Leif Segerstam, conductor. Finlandia 009

On This Day

Births

• 1915 - American composer George Perle, in Bayonne, N.J.;

• 1918 - Canadian composer Godfrey Ridout, in Toronto;

Deaths

• 1667 - (on May 6 or 7) German composer and keyboard player Johann Jakob Froberger, age 50, in Hericourt, nearr Montbeliard , France;

Premieres

• 1897 - Leoncavallo: opera "La Boheme" in Venice;

• 1981 - Rautavaara: Double-bass Concerto ("Angel of Dusk"),in Helsinki, with bassist Olli Kosonen and the Finnish Radio Symphony, Leif Segerstam conducting;

• 1985 - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: "Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players," by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble;

• 1992 - Libby Larsen: Symphony No. 3 ("Lyric"), by the Albany Symphony (NY), Joel Revzen conducting;

• 1999 - Magnus Lindberg: Cello Concerto, by the Orchestre de Paris, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Anssi Karttunen the soloist;

• 1999 - Christopher Rouse: "Seeing" (Piano Concerto), at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Slatkin, with Emanuel Ax the soloist;

Others

• 1872 - Theodore Thomas conducts the first concert of the Cincinnati Music Festival ("May Festival"); His program includes Beethoven's Fifth, Handel's "Dettingen Te Deum," a Mozart aria, and a chorus from Haydn's "Creation."