Madetoja: Complete Works for Strings and Piano

Every generation produces its shadow-composers, the ones who studied with the wrong genius at the wrong time and never quite escaped the association. Leevi Madetoja was Sibelius’s student, and worse than that, his favorite: the old man thought Madetoja the most gifted of his pupils, more gifted even than Kuula, and said so. It did the poor man no favors. History remembers the teacher and forgets that the student wrote an opera, The Ostrobothnians, that Finns still love, and three symphonies that occasionally surface on records and even more occasionally in concert halls outside Helsinki.

This new Alba release gathers, for what the annotators tell us is the first time complete, all of Madetoja’s chamber music for strings and piano: nine works, most of them modest, one or two genuinely arresting, spanning a composer’s whole working life. Mika Rännäli plays the piano parts with evident conviction; Anna-Liisa Bezrodny takes the violin, Jan-Erik Gustafsson the cello. The venue, Sibelius Hall in Järvenpää (yes, that Järvenpää, the town where the composer of Tapiola lived out his long silence at Ainola) lends the project a certain resonance whether or not the engineers intended it.

Let’s be honest about the salon pieces first, because there are a lot of them. Seven of the nine works here involve violin and piano, and most were written for the drawing room rather than the concert stage: occasional pieces, teaching pieces, pieces to be played after dinner while the brandy went round. The “Elegy” appears in a version most listeners will know from its orchestral guise, all hushed strings and sighing suspensions, and here reduced to violin and piano it loses some of its atmosphere but gains an intimacy that suits the release’s title. The Northern Ostrobothnian Folk Songs are charming, unpretentious, and forgettable within the hour. Pleasant enough that I found myself humming a phrase at breakfast the next morning without being able to say which piece it came from.

The revelation, such as it is, comes with the Sonatina. This is simply better music than everything around it: tighter argument, a slow movement of real melancholy beauty that breathes the same air as the Sixth Symphony’s wintry lyricism, and a finale that scampers along as a moto perpetuo with an almost Prokofiev-like glint in its eye. Bezrodny plays it with a silvery, slightly astringent tone that suits the music’s Nordic reticence. No schmaltz, no overselling, just clean lines and a sense of forward motion. I wanted the whole disc to sound like this movement.

The Piano Trio is the disc’s other substantial statement, nearly half an hour long, and it comes with a good story attached: Sibelius, tired of being shown “songs and a fugue or two,” told his student to bring him something bigger. Madetoja obliged, then apparently never showed it to him at all, which may explain why the piece runs long in every movement and never quite finds the editor’s blue pencil that Sibelius would surely have wielded. You hear Schumann in the harmonic language, Brahms in the developmental ambition, and now and then, in the second movement especially, a whiff of Debussy’s harmonic perfume trying to get in the door and not quite managing it. The piano writing throughout this disc tends toward the thick and four-square; Rännäli does what he can with textures that sit awkwardly under the hand, but the strings consistently get the better tunes. Gustafsson’s cello, when it appears, has a burnished, autumnal quality that this music badly wants more of.

Is this an important disc? Yes, cautiously. Most of this repertoire has never been recorded, some of it only once, and a scholarly-minded label deserves credit for assembling it under one roof with performers who clearly believe in it. Is it a great disc, one you’ll return to for pleasure rather than duty? No, not consistently. Madetoja without Sibelius looking over his shoulder, and without the orchestra to cushion his sometimes plain piano writing, sounds like a gifted, slightly earnest craftsman rather than a master. The Sonatina argues otherwise, brilliantly, and for that fifteen minutes alone this disc earns its place on the shelf next to the symphonies. For the rest: file under scholarly completeness, filed with respect, played rather less often than the liner notes might hope.