Outi Tarkiainen (b. 1985)
Midnight Sun Variations (2019)
Songs of the Ice (2019)
Milky Ways (2022)
The Ring of Fire and Love (2020)
Nicholas Daniel (cor anglais, Milky Ways)
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Collon
rec. 2023, Helsinki Music Centre, Finland
Ondine ODE 1432-2 [55]
I heard the first work on this disc on the radio and was drawn in, as the opening descending scales reminded me of Malcolm Arnold’s Symphony No. 6. There were no further similarities, but I was still attracted to the fascinating sound world of a composer new to me.
Outi Tarkiainen was born and lives in Finnish Lapland, having returned to the north of her country following studies in Helsinki, Miami, and London. Her main inspiration seems to be the Finnish landscape and her experiences of being a woman, more particularly motherhood: a deep connection to the natural world are themes that run through the works on this disc, and her acute ear for transparent orchestral textures and sonorities along with a marvellous sense of time leap out from all of the works; every magical sound is perfectly placed. The treatment of the Sami people of Lapland and the environment in general seems to have generated a barely contained sense of rage in her music. If all of that sounds rather daunting, the music will not be to those familiar with other Finnish composers such as Sibelius and Rautavaara, to whom she is a worthy successor.
The Midnight Sun Variationswas premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 and is about the light in the arctic summer night, when the northern sky above the Arctic Circle reflects a rich spectrum of an infinite variety of colours and, as autumn draws near, is once again cloaked in darkness. The vast wilderness of coniferous forest, the largest and most unpolluted in Europe was painted by Sibelius in his last large-scale work, Tapiola (1926), and the epic nature of that work has influenced the composer here.
The opening scales depict a sparkling ray of sunshine, and the orchestra acts as a multifaceted prism that throws different aspects of the scales into relief. Out of the dense, but always clear, orchestration, wind solos rise above the orchestra. Mr Collon, the first non-Finn to hold the post of chief conductor of this orchestra, perfectly balances the orchestral forces from dense textures to sparse, magical chords in string harmonics. Throughout this CD the sheer beauty of the sound and the precision of the playing are staggering. Everything is clear. In her notes for the work, the composer notes that her first child was born under a midnight sun. As well as being a depiction of the natural landscape, the work is also about giving birth, when the woman and the child part company, just as the summer light fades into autumn.
Songs of the Ice was commissioned by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in 2019 and dedicated to the island’s Okjökull glacier. The glacier was declared dead in 2014 and was Iceland’s first victim of climate change. It is a massive orchestral work about the vastness of ice, which swells in winter and shrinks in summer. The orchestra conjures up the giant glacier and as the work progresses a majestic procession sweeps all before it. It begins with the violent rumbling of chords before breaking off into grand yet disturbing wind solos, like primordial creatures from Norse mythology. The sudden appearance of a piano adds a surprisingly human touch to the landscape. The composer perfectly judges the build up to a tremendous climax before the works ends quietly with the sun reflected on the ice. As with the first work, this was written when the composer was expecting another child, this time in the heart of a freezing winter, and she notes that the piece also describes the emptiness and reclosing that occurs in a woman’s body after giving birth.
As with the previous works The Ring of Fire and Love is based on both natural phenomena and the female body all called The Ring of Fire. One is the volcanic belt that surrounds the Pacific Ocean and in which most of the world’s earthquakes occur. The second is the bright ring of sunlight around the moon at the height of a solar eclipse, when the moon covers only the central part of the sun. The same expression is also, apparently used to describe what a woman feels when the baby’s head passes through her pelvis during childbirth. This a is a far more turbulent work than the others with great crashes on the drums setting off fragments and swirls on the harp and woodwind. In a timeless endless soundscape created with the magical use of tuned percussion and harp. Maybe because of the Pacific link, this work has echoes of a seascape or storm. The composer’s inner ear is faultless, and the precision of her notation is perfectly captured by the performers. The Ring of Fire and Love feels like the perfect finale to the two preceding works but on the disc is separated by the Cor Anglais Concerto, which I think is a mistake.
Milky Ways, a concerto for cor anglais written for the soloist here, was co-commissioned by the BBC, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. There are very few concertos for cor anglaise; the only one that springs to mind is by Ned Rorem, called by him, in the American fashion, an English horn, so this one is doubly welcome. The cor anglais is a lower pitched sister of the oboe and is generally. in an orchestral context, given solos with great emotional weight. Here we see that it is capable of much more and the composer, clearly knowing she was writing for a virtuoso, makes it rise to the heights and sink to the depths. I have never heard Mr. Daniels plays the cor anglais before, but he is as expert on that rare instrument as he is on the more familiar oboe on which he is peerless.
The concerto is again inspired by motherhood and the circle of life, ‘We all began life on milky ways,’ says the composer. In various programme notes she has observed that the Greeks thought our galaxy looked like milk and our early life is dependent on mother’s milk. Perhaps Messiaen hinted at such things in his Des Canyons aux Etoiles (1974). Her programme notes in the score, not printed in the booklet, make the link to birth far more apparent. Such thoughts require a large orchestra, and the percussion players are asked to use over thirty instruments including, egg shakers, waterphone, ocean drum, and pitched gongs.
In the first movement The Infant Gaze, Afterwaves, she writes ‘The little eyes open a crack, and light is refracted from the milky, bronze-sheathed gaze of the new-born babe. The gaze makes the woman’s body tingle, like a breath… A little pressure, a little twinge: God releases the flow from the woman’s breast’. Early on in this movement the soloist is asked to use multiphonics to improvise the ‘bronze colour of the infant’s eyes.’ Mr. Daniels does a sterling job. There is much material here rising from the depths as though trying to escape all of which is expertly orchestrated. In the second movement Interplays, On the Milky Way… the child is now born, and the mother is able to enjoy its presence and sometimes playing. This is some of the only quick music on the CD and has a dance like quirky quality to it, Messiaen would probably call it a ‘cosmic dance’ with playful interplay between soloist and orchestra and some naughty sounding glissandi on the timpani and trombones and quarter-tone bends from the soloist. It is over before we know it. The finale At the Fountainhead of God. Perfect harmony is a nocturne in which ‘The babe grows drowsy, falls asleep. The two bodies are as if nested again…’ Within the slow context the cor anglais has much florid melismatic writing as though the baby is moving around to settle. In live performance while the wind instruments blow silently through their instruments the lights change and the soloist walks behind the players eventually leaving the stage playing the final notes out of sight. There is a magical use of a solo string trio in the final moments. While we cannot see this, the sound image is well captured by the engineers. There is a darker side to this movement which the composer writes of and that is that when Nicholas Daniels, was young, his mother committed suicide, and the finale thus links together birth and death.
As you may have gathered, this is music dealing with serious subject matter, and while much of it is static, such is the skill of the composer in managing our expectations of time that it never drags. I look forward to hearing more from her – if I am lucky, in live performance.
Paul RW Jackson
Previous review: Hubert Culot (May 2024)
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