Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara is internationally one of the best known and most frequently performed Finnish composers. He was by nature a romantic, even a mystic, as is often apparent from the titles of his works: for example Angels and Visitations for orchestra or his double-bass concerto Angel of Dusk. Despite Rautavaara’s label of “mysticism” he was a complex and contradictory figure whose works cannot be categorized in stylistic terms.  At the age of seventeen Rautavaara began studying the piano and later went on to study musicology at Helsinki University and composition at the Sibelius Academy. From 1951-53 he was a pupil of Aarre Merikanto, in 1955 the Koussewitzky Foundation awarded Rautavaara with a stipendium to study with Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School of Music and at Tanglewood with Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland. Rautavaara has taught and lectured at the Sibelius Academy as the professor of composition. Rautavaara’s earliest works revealed close ties to tradition but also his desire to renew it. They were followed by an extreme constructivist and avant-garde phase, after which Rautavaara turned to hyper-romanticism and finally mysticism. Since the early 1980s Rautavaara has adopted a sort of post-modern musical language in which modern and traditional elements of varying degrees of constructivism or freedom are combined with one another.  Rautavaara composed eight symphonies, the most frequently performed of them being the Angel of Light, his seventh symphony. Other important groups of works include concertos for different solo instruments, among them the three piano concertos, concertos for Violin, harp, clarinet, cello and percussion. Rautavaara has also written a large body of chamber music as well as choral and vocal works including All-Night Vigil for a cappella chorus. Rautavaara’s most popular orchestral work  is Cantus arcticus, concerto for birds and orchestra, in which the orchestral part is juxtaposed with the sounds of birds recorded by the composer himself. Apart form his symphonies the central pillars of Rautavaara's extensive oeuvre are his operas. With Vincent (1985-87) and The House of the Sun (1990) Rautavaara has scored a notable international success. Aleksis Kivi was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 1997 and it has been performed in Cosenza, Italy and Minneapolis, U.S.A since then. The last stage work Rautavaara wrote is Rasputin (2001-2003), an opera about the life of mystic and healer Grigory Rasputin.