Erkki Melartin (1875-1937)
Symphony No. 5 in A minor, Op.90 (1915)
Symphony No. 6, Op.100 (1925)
Turku Philharmonic Orchestra/Ari Rasilainen
rec. 2022, Turku Concert Hall, Finland
cpo 555 558-2 [67]
The six symphonies of Erkki Melartin have been recorded by the Tampere Philharmonic and Leonid Grin on Ondine but it’s good to welcome the coupling of Nos.5 and 6 in this new release from the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra under Ari Rasilainen on CPO.
The Fifth is a wartime work, completed in 1915, and keen to show its contrapuntal side, which it does almost immediately. However, the obverse is a gentle tapestry-like writing for winds and colour. Melartin reserves these lyric qualities for the slow movement where the orchestral sonority is warm, string themes are attractive and birdsong enlivens the wind writing. At one point Melartin generates a positive avian cacophony which anticipates a lovely string cantilena that ends in solemnity – the kind of solemnity, in miniature, to be found in Bruckner or Schmidt. But only as a punctuation point. The Intermezzo dances with birdsong and it too is saturated in lyric generosity whereas the finale opens with strangely dour counterpoint writing and becomes almost a study in fugal inversion, but at least it’s in the context of well-marshalled material. The outer movements of the fifth act as stern-ish tests whereas the inner movements release Melartin’s untrammelled lyricism. Grin takes the finale rather more quickly than Rasilainen but both tempi work well in the overall span of their performances.
Symphony No.6 followed a decade later, in 1925. Structured on the same lines – a conventional four-movement work – it inhabits a far stormier world. The shattering event that bisected both symphonies was the Finnish Civil War which accounted for the wholly understandable procrastination Melartin experienced – he had begun sketches for it as early as December 1918. The opening is particularly baleful and threatening – there is some Mahlerian horn writing along the way – before the barren, windswept canvas of this opening movement allows a brief moment of lyric respite and then swallows it up only to glower quietly to itself. The remarkable Andante suddenly projects a wholly different feeling, nature depiction, some Sibelian, of lissom warmth, although there is also a necessary contrast of greater urgency. The surprises this symphony throws up continue with the brief impressionist Japonaiserie of the third movement which appear as if from nowhere, the music soon relapsing into textural gauze-like elegance. The ostinati in the finale are pure Sibelius, the writing is once again terse, but increasingly brassy and powerful, before an optimistic all-conquering peroration crowns a perplexing, hallucinatory, troubled but nevertheless absorbing work. Rasilainen takes the inner movements rather more quickly than Grin but as with the Fifth Symphony there’s as much to be said for a slight relaxation of tempo as there is for pressing ahead.
The notes are excellent and the recording in Turku Concert Hall has been very well judged. I don’t know if this coupling heralds a complete symphonic cycle from the Turku Philharmonic and Rasilainen, but if so it certainly makes for a very fine start.
Jonathan Woolf
Other review: David Barker (November 2025)
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