Johanna Rusanen-Kartano News
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2024-04-23
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2016-02-21 00:15:00
As readers know, I feel that curiosity about having new musical experiences is an essential quality of any music lover. And particularly if you are a critic: it defines whether you can be a practitioner of this risky career or not. That is why I chose two very dissimilar events; I liked one of them and was horrified by the other. I have long cherished the splendid recording of Sibelius´ "Kullervo" by the Helsinki Philharmonic conducted by Paavo Berglund, a great artist that never came here. And I have waited in vain for its première here. "Kullervo" is a big programmatic symphony in five movements lasting an hour and ten minutes about an antihero from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, "compiled and shaped […]
2015-08-30 15:24:11
Royal Albert Hall, London Conductor Sakari Oramo shows Sibelius’s narrow distinction between tone poem and symphony; Torikka and Rusanen-Kartano sing with operatic panacheIt was left to Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to round out the 150th-anniversary tribute to Sibelius at the Proms, which they had launched on the opening night. Oramo opted to go back to where Sibelius’s career as an orchestral composer began, pairing En Saga and Kullervo. The two works, completed in 1892 (the former a tone poem and the latter a symphonic suite), were the starting point for what proved to be one of the most remarkable orchestral journeys since Beethoven. As Oramo’s urgent performances showed, what is remarkable about both En Saga and Kullervo is that, however much they reveal the 19th-century composers who were Sibelius’s starting point, they also point unambiguously to the future, and to the intensely personal language that he would […]
2015-08-30 07:44:00
Shockingly modern - Sibelius Kullervo Oramo Prom 58
Why did Jean Sibelius suppress Kullervo (Op7, 1892) ? There are many theories why he didn't allow it to be heard after its initial performance, though he referred to it fondly in private. Sakari Oramo considers Kullervo "a masterpiece", and, at Prom 58 at the Royal Albert Hall, London, conducted it with such conviction that there can be little doubt about its unique place in Sibelius's output, and indeed in music history. Kullervo is such a remarkable work, so shockingly original that Paavo Berglund revisited it fifteen years after his original recording,. Neeme Järvi brought yet more new insights. There have been many other performances since, but Sakari Oramo creates an interpretation of great depth and perceptiveness. From a hushed opening, the Allegro Moderato grew with ever increasing impatience, as if it were an Overture to an opera, for a quasi-opera this is. One cannot […]
2015-03-18 01:41:00
Jean Sibelius; Kullervo op 7, 1892 is a work so powerful that it seems to break out from the restraints of orchestral performance. Even now, the piece seems surprisngly modern.. Musically, it's explosive; fabulously "primitive" sounds which presage The Rite of Spring. Wild, whirling passages that suggest a driving snowstorm, a relentless battle to the death and implacable doom. Kullervo, whose story is told in the Kalevala, was an abused, brutalized child, whose inheritance was stolen, and he was cruelly mistreated by his uncle. He sees a lovely maiden in the forest and wants to posses her. Since he has no social graces, he rapes her. Then she tells her story, how she'd become lost in the forest while picking strawberries. She turns out to be his long-lost sister. All this, against a background of primeval Nature, in an unyielding climate where summers are fleeting. Perhaps Kullervo is the […]
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