Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Einojuhani Rautavaara
Joins Boosey & Hawkes

Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara has signed a long-term exclusive publishing contract with Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers. Rautavaara’s new agreement builds on the close relationship Boosey & Hawkes has developed with the composer in recent years through representing his Warner/Chappell, now Fennica Gehrman, works in key international territories. .

Rautavaara’s future compositions include an orchestral work for Mikko Franck and the Orchestre National de Belgique, a String Symphony for the Juilliard School of Music, and a Cello Concerto for Truls Mörk and the Minnesota Orchestra.

Long regarded as a major figure in 20th century Nordic music, Rautavaara reached a wide public and a new level of international acclaim in the 1990s thanks to best-selling recordings on the Ondine label of Angel of Light and Angels and Visitations and to worldwide performances of his most admired works such as Cantus arcticus, the Violin Concerto and his choral masterpiece Vigilia. Rautavaara’s music enjoys the advocacy of many of the leading conductors and soloists of our time, including Wolfgang Sawallisch, Osmo Vänskä, Mikko Franck, Marin Alsop, Leonard Slatkin, Leif Segerstam, Elmar Oliveira, Olli Mustonen, Richard Stoltzman and Vladimir Ashkenazy

Richard Stoltzman joins Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 13 May 2003 to present the UK premiere of the new Clarinet Concerto at the Barbican. Finnish National Opera mounts the world premiere of Rautavaara’s new opera, Rasputin, in Helsinki on 19 September 2003 featuring Matti Salminen as Rasputin and Jorma Hynninen as Nicholas II and conducted by Mikko Franck.

Boosey & Hawkes is widely regarded as having the world’s top catalogue in 20th century classical music, including the master works of Stravinsky, Britten, Bartók, Copland, Prokofieff, Rachmaninoff, Strauss and many others. Boosey & Hawkes’s select group of contemporary composers, which Einojuhani Rautavaara now joins, is one of the most prestigious in the world of classical music publishing. Composers who have signed with Boosey & Hawkes over the past two decades include John Adams, Steve Reich, James MacMillan, Louis Andriessen, Elliott Carter, Christopher Rouse, Harrison Birtwistle, Magnus Lindberg, Olga Neuwirth, Brett Dean, Unsuk Chin and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Rautavaara was born in Helsinki in 1928 and studied with Merikanto at the Helsinki Academy (1948-52), with Persichetti at the Juilliard School in New York (1955-56), and with Sessions and Copland at Tanglewood (1955). He first came to international attention in 1955 when the neo-classical A Requiem in Our Time for brass and percussion won the Thor Johnson Composer’s Competition in Cincinnati. He studied serialism and soon integrated twelve note techniques, without displacing his essential Romanticism. For instance, Symphony No.3 (1961) may employ serial procedures, yet it is also a tribute to the symphonies of Bruckner, complete with Wagner tubas, while in Symphony No.4 "Arabescata" (1962) Rautavaara created the first totally serial Finnish work.

In the late 1960s Rautavaara distanced himself from serialism and his mystical character came more to the fore in music of rich colour and sweeping melody profile, at once accessible and evocative. His operas have often explored issues of creativity and madness, such as Vincent (1986-87), Aleksis Kivi (1995-96) and Rasputin (2001-03), and his symphonies and concerti have increasingly been commissioned by orchestras outside his native Finland, including most recently Symphony No.8 ‘The Journey’ (1999) for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a Harp Concerto (1999-2000) for the Minnesota Orchestra and a Clarinet Concerto (2001-02) for Richard Stoltzman and the National Symphony in Washington.

Web Site

Piano Concerto No. 3
"Gift of Dreams", Autumn Gardens
Composer: Einojuhani Rautavaara
Performer(s): Helsinki Philharmonic
Vladimir Ashkenazy

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