About Me
It is my belief that music is great if, at some moment, the listener catches "a glimpse of eternity through the window of time", if the experience is one which Arthur Koestler might call ‘the oceanic feeling". This, to my mind, is the only true justification for all art. All else is of secondary importance.
I found a website about me and it is very complimentary. This is what it says…
Einojuhani Rautavaara writes music that is extremely beautiful without being banal or blatantly superficial, quite an achievement in this day and age.
The Rautavaara boom is still going strong, and no end is in sight. His Concerto for Harp and Orchestra was premiered in Minnesota in October 2000. A critic in the leading Minnesota daily declared that the world had gained an excellent new harp concerto. Rautavaara solved the problem of volume by doubling the solo part by having two harps in the orchestra. In April 2000, the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Rautavaara’s Eighth Symphony, which it had commissioned, under Wolfgang Sawallisch in Philadelphia. Sub-titled The Journey, the symphony was also performed in New York and on tour in Europe in Cologne, Helsinki and Leipzig. Much was made of the fact that Rautavaara had reached the number eight, the mystical Eighth Symphony that Jean Sibelius, who in the 1950s recommended Rautavaara for a scholarship to study in the USA, never completed.
Early in 2000, a recording of Rautavaara’s Third Piano Concerto (Gift of Dreams, 1998) and Autumn Gardens, premiered at the London Proms in summer 1999, was released. The conductor and pianist is Vladimir Ashkenazy, who had commissioned the concerto. The disc received high critical acclaim in international music periodicals.
Rautavaara has gone through a number of stylistic phases. He struck gold with his Seventh Symphony, Angel of Light. The beautiful music and spiritual title attracted international interest, and Rautavaara soon found himself adorning the covers of distinguished music magazines. In his new-found success, Rautavaara has kept solidly to his present style, a synthesis of everything he has learned in the course of his career. Rautavaara has, in fact, become a respectable alternative for those who seek spiritual content but have abandoned New Age music. Other "angel" works of his, such as Angels and Visitations and Angel of Dusk, have also been recorded.
"It is probably down to the spirit of the times, the Zeitgeist. After all, angels are popular now. I felt self-conscious about putting angels in the titles of my works in the 1970s, when my colleagues were giving their works matter-of-fact titles such as Structures for Strings. Now, I feel self-conscious about the fact that angels have become popular in a banal sense with the New Age phenomenon," says the composer.
Rautavaara is a mystic who considers that his compositions already exist in "another reality." His job is to bring a composition into the world in one piece. "I firmly believe that compositions have a will of their own, though some people smile at the concept," he says.
Mystic though he is, his career was firmly grounded in Modernism. He made his breakthrough in 1954, winning the Thor Johnson competition in the USA with A Requiem in Our Time. Rautavaara continued his studies abroad and became thoroughly acquainted with Serialist techniques.
The confines of Serialism proved inadequate for Rautavaara, and he began to experiment with a variety of ideas. The most popular result is Cantus Arcticus (1972), a concerto for birds and orchestra. This is a combination of electronically processed taped birdsong and beautifully sonorous orchestral music.
In his symphonies, Rautavaara has explored extremities. His Third Symphony is a Serialist construct, yet it sounds almost like Bruckner. His Fourth Symphony, originally titled Arabescata, demonstrates his writing at its most strictly Modernist. The single-movement Fifth Symphony has an exciting spiral structure, and the Sixth Symphony (Vincentiana) is a spin-off from the opera Vincent. Angel of Light and The Journey represent Rautavaara’s current approach, a synthesis of a wide range of styles.
Rautavaara is also known for his operas, which include Thomas, Vincent, Auringon talo (House of the Sun) and Aleksis Kivi, premiered in 1997. The same year, he also wrote Isle of Bliss and a String Quintet, further proof of the enchantment of his attractive synthesis of styles.
"If an artist is not a Modernist when he is young, he has no heart. And if he is a Modernist when he is old, he has no brain," the composer said in a press interview in Philadelphia in April 2000.
