Piano Concerto No.1 (1969)

Con grandezza

Andante

Molto vivace

There is probably no clearer example of post-modernist music than Rautavaara’s First Piano Concerto. Although the dates dont quite work out – the concerto was writen in 1969 whereas post-modernism was essentially a phenomenon of the 1980s – there is no other way to describe this extraordinary work. In the early 1960s Rautavaara had been a thoroughgoing modernist, Finland’s leading avant-gardist, a lonely prophet of total serialism in a country where Sibelius still represented the ultimate development. But then disillusion with such extreme modernism intervened and Rautavaara ‘returned,’ as he put it, ‘to the maternal lap of an expressive aesthetic’ – in other words, to a kind of romanticism. This literally ‘post-modernist’ attitude of Rautavaara the composer was supported by Rautavaara the pianist, who was disappointed by what he called the ‘anaemic’ piano style fashionable at the time: ‘I wanted in my concerto to restore the entire rich grandeur of the instrument, to write a cocerto ‘in the grand style’.’

This does not mean, however, that Rautavaara’s First Piano Concerto sounds like Rachmaninov. The chord clusters struck with the flat of the pianist’s hand in the opening bars are an immediate and fairly brutal indication that modernism has not been banished. But even here, in the rolling figuration of the pianist’s other hand, there are signs of a romantic concerto trying to get out. More of the romantic image emerges in a passage where the orchestra siezes the foreground and horns project a passionately jubilant proclamation against rising and falling scales on the piano. Other aspects of the concerto trying to get out are heard in a more lyrical, Ravel-like impressionistic episode introduced by the piano and, later, in brass fanfares distantly echoed on woodwind. But even the most delicate material, as a short central cadenza demonstrates, is liable to be assaulted by those hefty keyboard dissonances. Towards the end, however, where the hand clusters are magnified into whole foream clusters, the orchestra refuses to be intimidated out of its romantic glory.

There are more stylistic contradictions in the Andante. But here the piano dissonances, violent though they can be, seem to be not so much imposed on as developed from the modal harmonies of the initially gentle chorale presented by the piano against long-sustained string lines. In fact, the chorale element, oddly reminiscent of Vaughan Williams in places, prevails for much of the movement, with the melody passing to the strings even as the piano part becomes more assertive. But, inevitably perhaps, the quiet, sensitively scored central episode is shattered by percussive keyboard dissonances, reinforced now by a tam-tam stroke. Although the chorale is briefly recalled, a largely but not entirely violent cadenza jostles it out of the way in preparation for the next movement.

The Molto vivace, which follows without a break, is a madly energetic dance which seems to confirm, at least to begin with, that one of the icons of the past that the composer had in mind was the Ravel Concerto in G – although Ravel never used additive rhythms or got anywhere near the level of violence accumulated by Rautavaara’s soloist in the unstoppable progress towards his explosively abrupt ending.

Gerald Larner ©2008