Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Concert Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, Mannerheimintie 13 A, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
“The sheng is a free-reed mouth organ born over 3,000 years ago in China.” Jukka Tiensuu (born 1948) has written Teoton (2015) for it. The sheng has a relatively small voice, gentle and shallow, not given to loud, at least not here, although it does spiky well, as in the moto perpetuo opening, rapid exchanges with the (quite large, for variety) orchestra, staccatos to the fore, tenutos introduced later for when exploring mysteries, an accordion-like timbre and vibrato coming into its own, and not forgetting an astonishing rapid passage, initially cadenza-like for the sheng, displaying Wu Wei’s complete virtuosity (also demonstrated in his encore), the orchestra obliged and able to match. Over twenty-five minutes, Teoton proved attractive and diverting, Tiensuu writing idiomatically for the sheng’s indigenous properties and also its world-stage potential, the music fading to silence at the end, giving the impression that it may be continuing elsewhere.
Had Shostakovich not withdrawn his Fourth Symphony during initial rehearsals it would certainly have found Stalin less than chuffed (the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had already been denounced). The work waited twenty-five years for its Russian world premiere (Kondrashin; Rozhdestvensky in the UK; Ormandy in the US). Initially from Nicholas Collon there was a lack of danger and strangeness, however well-played, but as the minutes passed greater intensity was found, so too an appreciation of the many events feeding the Symphony’s history as well as its substance – comedy, tragedy, hysteria, desolation – the corresponding large-scale third (final) movement – from funeral to fairground – episodes inextricably leading to a baleful climax bursting at the seams, the coda, with chilling celesta, watery, death by drowning. Collon & FRSO became more involving and revealing; yet, over a longer timespan, Sokhiev in Berlin started as he meant to go on.