Einojuhani Rautavaara, Usko Meriläinen

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

An exemplary document of Finnish music in its moment of highest international ambition — two concertante works from composers whose names belong in any serious account of post-war Nordic modernism, issued by Finlandia Records in a recording of genuine authority.

Angel of Dusk (1980) by Einojuhani Rautavaara — for double bass and orchestra — arrives here in the first recording of one of the composer's most characteristically mysterious creations. Rautavaara (1928–2016), Finland's most internationally recognized composer after Sibelius and Kokkonen, drew on a spiritual vision that embraced both late Romanticism and modernist technique without fully committing to either: his was a music of threshold states, hauntings, the luminous space between the human and the angelic. The very title points toward a cosmology that runs through much of his work — Angel of Light, Angels and Visitations — and the double bass here, in its deep, resonant register, occupies a liminal zone at the edge of orchestral texture. The writing is luminous and strange.

Usko Meriläinen (1930–2004), less widely known outside Finland but held in high regard within it, represents a more rigorous application of modernist technique: his Concerto for Double Bass and Percussion Instruments is a work of considerable severity — sharp-edged, percussive, maintaining a formal tension that keeps the listener off balance throughout. Two complementary approaches to the possibilities of the solo double bass, and two complementary Scandinavian modernisms on a single LP. Finlandia FA 339.