Lahti Symphony Orchestra/Dalia Stasevska
BIS BIS-2701 (CD/SACD) 62:56 mins
This is my first encounter with Helvi Leiviskä, a 20th-century Finnish composer whose name somehow hasn’t travelled overseas along with those of Sibelius and Rautavaara. Perhaps that’s because she was a woman but, argues Eila Tarasti in her booklet notes, Leiviskä’s works were known, performed and positively reviewed in her lifetime. Trained in Helsinki and Vienna, she became a composer, music critic and librarian at the Sibelius Academy, and while not prolific, wrote three symphonies, various orchestral, vocal, chamber and piano works.
Whatever the reason Leiviskä has remained a shadowy figure, conductor Dalia Stasevska has
now brought to light three of her orchestral works in fine performances by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, that give a strong flavour of what we’ve missed.
After the darkly hued, rich Sinfonia Brevis, a one-movement piece from 1962 (revised 1972), we have the immediately appealing 1930s Orchestral Suite No. 2, which brings together music from the film Juha by Nyrki Tapiovaara. It opens with a movement of springy rhythmic energy and freshness, similar in spirit to Walton, before moving into a rustic dance-like Humoresque. The melancholic, tonal Lullaby leads to a tense, vivid Epilogue. And although this music was written for film, it translates brilliantly to the concert hall.
Symphony No. 2 finds Leiviskä in knottier territory, when she’d developed her style from late Romanticism into something more austere, more abstract. The questing, brooding woodwind opening opens up into more expansive – though no less emotionally stable – territory, in which brass fanfares and brooding strings create a tragic mood. An enigmatic, energetic central movement is followed by a finale that begins with wistful flute and heads into music of Shostakovich-like bleakness. It ends quietly.
