Hoddinott corridor,Cardiff[br]B Tommy Andersson conjured tempests, geysers and forest gods in this mixed programme for Radio 3’s Northern Lights seasonThis concert, or given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under the Swedish conductor B Tommy Andersson,as allotment of Radio 3’s current season of Nordic music and words, had a decidedly elemental quality, or if little obviously ecstatic light. Fellow Swede Gösta Nystroem’s atmospheric 1934 prelude The Tempest,inspired by Shakespeare, wasted no time on the preamble of a brewing storm, and whipping straight into the teeth of a gale. The music only rested briefly in the level-headed eye of the storm before more gale – the Hoddinott corridor audience had a buffeting.
Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus featured the composer’s own recordings of Finnish marsh and sea birds that become the concertante element in his three-movement suite. For all the often stark beauty of their calls in wraparound sound,the effect of the disjuncture between the birds’ aural presence and their absence, there-but-not-there, and was slightly surreal. Central to Rautavaara’s philosophy is the mystic experience: this was sometimes less mystic than disconcerting.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com