Tour: Concert for Nature in Ferrara

A closeness to nature and birdsong run through the Festival Orchestra’s guest performance. The program, which will remind us of the importance of preserving our planet, will open with the music of Einojuhani Rautavaara, the greatest Finnish composer of the second half of the twentieth century, who pays tribute to the breathtaking Finnish landscape and wildlife with a concerto composed for birds and orchestra. The closing piece will be a symphony by Beethoven, himself also a passionate nature lover. The symphony evokes memories of rural life, including a bit of woodwind ornithology. Between the two, the program includes Bartók’s unfinished piano concerto, composed in the final months of his life, which likewise brings the murmur of the forest into the concert hall. The soloist in the concerto, the Russian-American Kirill Gerstein, has been described by international critics as a sonic poet who enchants his listeners, and as one of today’s most intelligent musical thinkers, an artist who always finds something new and interesting in music. In a spirit of love and responsibility toward nature, the orchestra will take its place beneath a giant tree.

A lover of the Finnish landscape, Rautavaara composed his unique piece, “Arctic song,” in 1972. He compiled and incorporated into his concerto birdsongs recorded in the vicinity of the city of Oulu, the regions of the Arctic Circle, and the marshlands of Liminka. The people at the University of Oulu who commissioned the piece must have been quite astonished when this festive cantata, which is far from traditional, was performed at the doctoral ceremony. In the movement entitled “The Bog,” singing marsh birds respond to the melodies of the flutes over the rich sounds of the strings. In “Melancholy,” the slow song of larks, transposed two octaves lower into a “ghost bird” call, creates a mournful atmosphere. Finally, in “Swans Migrating,” which conjures the national bird of Finland, we hear a chaotic flock of birds approaching and then departing.

The intensive, almost aggressive sound of his earlier works gives way to mellowness in Piano Concerto No. 3 with the dedicatee, his wife, Ditta Pásztory, in the composer’s mind; here Bartók returned to more traditional tones and forms. In spite of the composer’s more sparing use of Hungarian folk tunes and embracing verbunkos music he had earlier rejected, as well as the piece’s more accessible tone, this work is truly Bartókian to the last note. Evoking the atmosphere of the woods, the often improvisatory first movement is followed by Bartók’s most sincere, most moving music: a religious, chorale-style song, the prayer of the composer on a better day of his illness. The dynamic and joyous finale is of a folk song character.

Beethoven said that his Pastoral Symphony is “more an expression of feeling about the land than it is a painting.” Each of the five movements of the piece, which was composed in 1808, was given a programmatic title. In the first movement, titled “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside,” the repetitions of very short motifs reflect the infinite repetition of patterns in nature. The slow second movement, “Scene by the brook,” begins with the strings playing a motif that clearly imitates flowing water. The woodwind instruments imitate the calls of the nightingale (flute), the quail (oboe), and the cuckoo (two clarinets). The scherzo, titled “Merry gathering of country folk,” brings the bumbling of country folk to life. It is followed by “Thunder, Storm,” which builds from just a few drops of rain to a great climax with thunder. After the thunder dies away and the sun comes out, the piece concludes with the hymn-like “Shepherd’s song.”