Neeme Järvi turns 86 this year, and the thought that he might be slowing down is refuted, emphatically, by this Gothenburg disc — his homecoming release with an orchestra he led for twenty-two years and clearly still loves.
The Rautavaara is the heart of it. Cantus arcticus — the full title, Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, tells you almost everything — began as a commission from the University of Oulu, up in northern Finland where the landscape is flat, cold, and immense. Rautavaara could have written something ceremonial, a Finnish equivalent of the Brahms Academic Festival Overture. He didn’t. He went outside instead, literally: the “soloists” are taped field recordings of wild birds native to that region, woven into the orchestral texture with a craft that remains astonishing more than fifty years on. The piece dates from 1972, when electronic manipulation of natural sound was still a novelty, but Rautavaara was never really interested in the avant-garde for its own sake. What he wanted — and got — was something older and stranger than modernism. A kind of sacred naturalism.
The three movements follow an ABA pattern, each centered on a different bird species, and the structural simplicity is the point. Rautavaara understood that if you’re setting wild cranes against a string orchestra, you don’t need complexity — you need space, and silence, and the courage to let the music breathe.
The opening movement, “The Bog,” carries the subtitle “Think of Autumn and of Tchaikovsky.” It’s a good joke with a serious meaning. The orchestral writing does evoke late Tchaikovsky, that particular autumnal weight, the sense of something irretrievable — and then the cranes arrive on tape and suddenly you’re not in a concert hall at all. Järvi’s players achieve something genuinely difficult here: they blend with the recorded birds rather than competing with them. The cello solo that closes the movement is played with plain, unaffected warmth, no romanticizing, and it lands harder for the restraint. The middle movement, “Melancholy,” features larks, and the string writing is luminous — Rautavaara in his most straightforwardly beautiful mode, which was luminous indeed. The finale, “Swans Migrating,” circles back to the opening before arriving at a chorale of quiet radiance. The birds get the last word. Rightly so.
Osmo Vänskä’s BIS recording with the Finnish Radio Symphony has long been my reference, and it remains a formidable document — crisper in the bird-orchestra integration, perhaps, with a slightly cooler Nordic edge. But Järvi’s version has something Vänskä’s doesn’t quite reach: a quality of lived-in affection, an old man’s tenderness toward a landscape he understands. This is not a criticism of Vänskä. It is simply a different kind of knowledge.
Then there is Alfvén. Hugo Alfvén occupies a peculiar position in the catalog — celebrated in Sweden, beloved for the Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 (Midsommarvaka), and somewhat condescended to elsewhere, as if lyric nationalism were an embarrassment. It isn’t. The Festspel, op. 25, dates from 1907, a period when Alfvén’s larger ambitions were temporarily stalled, and he was visiting the poet Verner von Heidenstam — Nobel laureate, nationalist visionary — when the piece took shape. It’s ceremonial music that knows it’s ceremonial music and makes a virtue of the fact. Brass fanfares, open textures, a direct emotional appeal. Järvi plays it with the swagger it requires.
The Gustav II Adolf Suite, op. 49, is a different matter — substantial, uneven, and underrecorded. The “Elegi” movement has occasionally surfaced in anthologies, where its Griegian melancholy sounds quite beautiful in isolation. Heard complete, the suite is more interesting, if not always consistent. Alfvén wrote it in 1932, deep in his late period, and there are passages — particularly in the more martial sections — where the inspiration thins. Järvi doesn’t disguise this, exactly, but his commitment to the material is absolute, and that commitment is persuasive.
The Gothenburg Symphony plays throughout with idiomatic assurance — these are not exotic repertoire finds for them, but part of an inherited tradition, music that belongs to the hall it was recorded in. The live acoustic is warm without muddiness, the SACD engineering spacious. There is one moment, early in the Rautavaara, when an audience member shifts audibly in a seat — a tiny intrusion, gone in a second, and oddly endearing.
Järvi has championed both composers for decades, and this disc has the feel of a valediction — not a farewell exactly, but a summing up. Essential for anyone who cares about Rautavaara, and more than that for anyone willing to follow Järvi wherever his enthusiasms lead. They have always been worth following.
