Paavali Jumppanen
Friday, February 7, 2025
Concert Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, Mannerheimintie 13 A, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
As part of its “Boulez 100” series the Finnish Radio SO opened with Rituel, premiered in London in 1975, the composer conducting the BBCSO. It was clear then that this was a score of substance with a long reach, and it remains so. The orchestra is arranged into eight groups, each with a percussionist, with two being allocated to the large brass contingent:
- one oboe
- two clarinets in B♭
- three flutes
- four violins
- wind quintet (oboe, clarinet in B♭, saxophone, two bassoons)
- string sextet (two violins, two violas, two cellos)
- wind septet (alto flute, oboe, English horn, E♭ clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons)
- brass ensemble (four trumpets, six horns, four trombones)
The percussion (numerous gongs, chimes, and assorted wooden, skin and metal instruments) mark time while expressive woodwinds and the distinctive material for strings and brasses develop into an ever-more elaborate and intense processional, motifs continuing to sustain the journey – quite a piece for Boulez to have composed to remember his friend, fellow-composer-and-conductor Bruno Maderna, which Hannu Lintu and FRSO members sustained with confidence and gravitas for the signed-off twenty-five minutes.
Following a considerable platform alteration, an attractive and brilliant account of one of Messiaen’s birdsong-based creations, Paavali Jumppanen the virtuoso pianist, woodwinds and brass (no strings attached) given wings, tweets and a cacophony of vocal impressions. (Following this concert, Jumppanen was scheduled to give a late-night recital of Boulez’s Piano Sonata No.2.) The concert’s second half coupled Stravinsky and John Adams, the latter calling upon the former at the opening of Slonimsky’s Earbox (written in memoriam of Nicolas Slonimsky, the musicologist and conductor who died on Christmas Day 1995 aged 101), both played and detailed brilliantly, whether Adams’s hectic showpiece or Stravinsky’s vivid description of the busy Emperor’s court, the strangeness of the mechanical nightingale, the sadness of the real one, and the radiance of the fisherman’s song.
The concert’s ambition delivered, the orchestra’s paraphernalia cleared, piano, audience and cameras remained for Paavali Jumppanen to return for Boulez’s four-movement, half-hour Second Piano Sonata (1948), dominated by Pollini’s DG recording, which Jumppanen nonetheless made his own for the thirty minutes (and he has also recorded it for the yellow label together with its two Sonata companions) embracing extremes of tempo and hard-core modernism. Uncompromising the music may be, but I was pleased to have hung around.
Pierre Boulez: Rituel, in memoriam Bruno Maderna
Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques
Igor Stravinsky: Le chant du Rossignol
John Adams: Slonimsky’s Earbox