Visiting the Naantali Music Festival on Saturday, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Artistic Director Pekka Kuusisto greeted their fully packed Naantali Church audience with a calling card programme of ravishing inspiration, unveiled with outstanding ensemble virtuosity and joint craft.
The evening’s wonderful augur, Anna Berg’s Returnal (2023) for string orchestra was given its world premiere performance by Kuusisto and the ensemble in Oslo on 29 August 2023. Commissioned by the NCO, the ca. ten-minute score is the third musical work in Berg’s recent instrumental triptych, featuring Earthward, Ever Circling (2023) for string trio and Twirling, Revolving (2023) for flute, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, violin, viola, cello and double bass as its previous installments, all inspired in various ways by Vietnamese ritual music.
“’The living need light, the dead need music’. The quote is from a Vietnamese Buddhist funeral ritual, where different forms of music are used to prepare the soul of the newly deceased for reincarnation. Funeral music is an important part of Vietnamese cultural heritage and tradition, that along with many rites across the world is about to disappear. I’m fascinated by how music in this ritual is used as a tool for the living to communicate with the soul of the deceased, creating a link between lived life and new lives yet to come.
In the three different pieces, I’ve used my imagination to fantasize further upon the ritual. In Earthward, Ever Circling I imagine a circular motion between an earthly life, represented by the lower registers of the strings, and a heavenly state, in the strings’ higher registers, and the piece is a constant interplay and push-and-pull between the two stages. In Twirling, Revolving I apply a narrower view, where I imagine one soul’s hectic and swirling route from the earthly life to the afterlife, or the state in between lives.
In Returnal I continue the idea of reincarnation, where I’m imagining the soul’s process of searching for and finding a body to settle in for the next earthly life. In the piece we can hear phrase-like states and shimmering chords, which never fully settle down. There’s a constant gliding movement between the instrument groups, where one group stretches towards the other instruments, and the lines and initiatives created by one group are succeeded by another group”, the composer writes in her note.
The music opens with a descending figure on violas, echoed in various permutations on lower and upper strings, giving rise to four-measure hall of mirrors, landing on hushed leggiero a punta d’arco tremolo chord. In terms of colorization, the interplay between ordinario, tremolo and flautando voicings in long-held notes plays a key rôle throughout Returnal, to spellbinding effect.
Animated melodic lines appear briefly on violins and violas, before the music assumes more elusive character around figure B. However, the material in quick to gain new shape and hue, transforming into translucent choirs of refined string polyphony. Completing their cycle on figure D comma, the ensemble pauses for a moment, before embarking upon the next recurrence, which then lands on a fermata, followed by three tutti chords separated by full rests.
“We can hear chords and passages behaving in different manners; they can be still, hesitant and waiting, they can be glimmering or trembling, or they can be transformed into longer passages with more movement, stretching from light to dark and vice versa. The piece unravels a search where different musical states of being are tested out and held onto as a way of trying on different possible lives, before, in the end, the ensemble finally settles down and lands”, the composer writes.
Once the final cycle of development is heard, Returnal arrives on its captivating sixteen-measure coda of flautando molto vibrato and non flautando meno vibrato chords, which then slows down to pianissimo standstill on the molto sul tasto final chord of exquisite color.
Performed with vivid reactivity and fine-tuned detail by the Norwegians and Kuusisto, Returnal was given a splendid Finnish premiere. Taking hold upon each and every listener, Berg’s musical narratives were wonderfully accounted by the ensemble and Kuusisto, their minutiae care over sonic detail being admirable indeed. Keeping up with their inspired dedication to contemporary music, as manifested by their first joint recording of Nico Muhly and Philip Glass back in 2021, the orchestra and Kuusisto owned Berg’s score in full measure.
Appearing as the evening’s absorbing centerpiece, Johannes Brahms’s autumnal masterstroke, Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115 (1891) was heard in enthralling outing, featuring Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Clarinet Christoffer Sundqvist as soloist. Given in Kuusisto’s spot-on 2017 arrangement for clarinet and string orchestra, the quintet is a substantial affair, cast in four movements and clocking at ca. 37 minutes. As seen through its orchestral prism, the score comes off as an intriguing fusion of a chamber work, a concerto and a symphony, their concentric trajectories leading to a ravishing musical summa.
Kuusisto’s subtle arrangement follows Brahms’s original note-to-note, zooming in and out between solo and tutti textures, while adding double bass lines here and there to enhance the low notes of the celli, mostly. As in the quintet setting, the clarinet part assumes various rôles along the way, taking the stage for fully-fledged concertante appearances and blending in with the strings for refined ensemble workouts alike.
The expansive sonata-allegro first movement in primed with a brief, leisured, four-measure preamble for strings alone, out of which the solo clarinet picks up melodic kernels for further meditation and development in dialogue with the string ensemble. Accentuated second theme ensues, establishing the movement’s core duality. In the course of its ca. thirteen-minute arch, the Allegro constitutes a wondrous endeavor, delving deep into its material, presenting us with a captivating study in mood and texture, beautifully transcribed into sounding reality by Sundqvist and the Kuusisto-led orchestra.
From the outset, one could but marvel the depth of musical communication between the soloist and the ensemble, their joint creativity yielding to nuanced expressivity of rare quality and profound mutual inspiration, not to mention their seamless interlock in phrasing and rhythmic motion alike.
Solo clarinet leads the way into the lyrical Adagio, accompanied by velvety fabric of muted strings. Clouds soon appear on the sunlit sky, leading the ensemble into contemplative chiaroscuro, out of which impassioned solo lines arise against heated string tremolos. The gentler opening moods return to close the ca. ten-minute movement in dream-like manner.
Introduced with an unhurried Andantino, the third movement proceeds to establish its kinetic Presto non assai, ma con sentimento main tempo, developing into four-minute dancescape, serving as dexterous interlude of sorts.
The Con moto finale assumes the shape of theme and five variations, with flashbacks from the second and the first movements embedded. Although there are moments of playfulness and bliss midway into the movement, pensive moods prevail throughout Brahms’s ca. ten-minute finale, leading the music into its farewell-like coda of reflective resignation.
A remarkably keen reading from Sundqvist, Kuusisto and the orchestra, the Quintet was rendered with top-tier musicality and shared commitment, giving rise to a Brahmsian journey of utmost intensity and finesse. Living and breathing together from the first movement opening to the final double bar, the musicians delivered a milestone performance.
The evening’s musical intensity carried on into the second half, as the orchestra and Kuusisto returned to the stage to conclude their Naantali visit with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, op. 110a (1960). Sanctioned by the composer, Rudolf Barshai’s 1974 string orchestra arrangement of String Quartet No. 8 in C minor is another case in point where solo string fabric lends itself marvelously to ensemble textures, with enhanced expressivity.
Composed in only three days while Shostakovich was working on a film score in Dresden in July 1960, the five-movement score is often regarded as an autobiographical statement, filled with quotations from such key works as the First (1924-25) and the Fifth Symphonies (1937) as well as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (1930-32), alongside the composer’s signature DSCH motif. Writing the quartet may have provided Shostakovich with a way out of his suicidal tendencies at the time, as its bleak musical edifices are prone to attest.
The sequence of movements unfolds attacca, lending the ca. twenty-four-minute score with an arch-like overall form of Largo – Allegro molto – Allegretto – Largo – Largo. The first movement is introduced by layered lines of the DSCH signature, out of which first melodic shapes emerge, recalling those of the First Symphony’s opening, followed by solitary laments. The ensuing Allegro molto plunges into raging repeats of machine-like menace, constituting a sinister danse macabre. The central Allegretto is hardly less ardent, its sardonic motifs leading the music ever deeper towards the heart of darkness.
Dissolving into the Largo fourth movement, the infernal choreography is followed by a juxtaposition of dead-slow drones and hammering chords, which then give way to solemn laments, interrupted by recurring chordal interjections. Towards the end of the movement, the music becomes increasingly sparse, eventually bridging into the desolate closing movement, featuring material from Lady Macbeth alongside the DSCH motif. On the final pages, the music evaporates into nothingness.
Given in tremendous performance by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Kuusisto, the Chamber Symphony was sounded out with astounding dedication and fortitude, presenting the musical testimonies in all their shattering honesty. An unforgettable quest into the dark, with harrowing contemporary overtones embedded, the reading was in a league of its own.
Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
Pekka Kuusisto, violin and leader
Christoffer Sundqvist, clarinet
Anna Berg: Returnal (2023) for string orchestra (Finnish premiere)
Johannes Brahms: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op. 115 (1891), arranged for clarinet and string orchestra by Pekka Kuusisto (2017)
Dmitri Shostakovich: Chamber Symphony, op. 110a (1960) for string orchestra, arrangement of String Quartet No. 8 by Rudolf Barshai (1974)
Naantali Music Festival
Naantali Church, Naantali, Finland
Saturday 8 June, 6 pm
© Jari Kallio
AIM - Adventures in Music 
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