Within the expansive realm of recorded music, the best albums come off as sounding discoveries. In order to make this happen, several parameters must be aligned – repertoire, performance and post-production being the obvious core markers. However, to boldly go beyond mere container of assorted takes calls forth musical narrative proper. All these things come happily together on Unrecorded., the new album by Linda Suolahti, violin, Tiina Karakorpi, piano and Mari Viluksela, viola, released on Alba Records, featuring absorbing cycle of duos by Helvi Leiviskä, Ann-Elise Hannikainen and Cecilia Damström – three Finnish composers with strikingly individual voices.
Spear-headed by Leiviskä’s ca. 25-minute Violin Sonata in G minor, op. 21 (1945) in three movements, Unrecorded. adds substantial layer to the ongoing revival of the composer’s notable output, as recently demonstrated by the release of the first volume of her orchestral works, recorded by the Lahti Symphony and Dalia Stasevska. In the manner of Leiviskä’s three symphonies, the Violin Sonata displays Brahmsian sense of proportion and structural poise, while retaining highly original musical thinking, perhaps analogous to the oeuvre of Arnold Bax.
Regarding Leiviskä’s chamber music, three scores stand out in scope and scale, namely the Piano Trio (1924), the Piano Quartet (1925-26/1935) and the Violin Sonata – the latter being her crowning achievement in the medium. Dedicated to the memory of the composer’s younger brother Aulis Leiviskä, killed in WWII, the Sonata opens with relatively concise Allegro risoluto, followed by elegiac Larghetto con anima and rounding off with an Allegro con fuoco finale, an intense musical search revisiting material from previous movements.
As beautifully recorded by Suolahti and Karakorpi, the aural blueprint of Leiviskä’s Sonata is rendered with virtuosic clarity and textural heat, without ever succumbing to superficial pathos. Ebbing and flowing between upheaval and repose, the opening movement grows organically to its narrative peak, maintaining lyrical intensity throughout the entire sounding arch of harmonic twists and turns. The central movement is a meditative affair, with long-held string lines gorgeously unfolded against subtly dexterous keyboard accompaniment. Halfway into the journey, the music comes to momentarily near-stasis on restated piano chords, before retaining its innate quest to the quiet unknown.
Wandering hither and thither, the closing movement treads its winding path across some shadowy musical forest quite unlike those visited by Sibelius, before finding its way towards a sounding opening and the Sonata’s eventual resolution. At the end, just before the curtain-fall, we gaze upon a swift sunrise – a momentary vision soon shrouded in silence.
Up next, Hannikainen’s brief Zafra (1985) for violin and piano picks up whole different storyline. Playful and quirky, the five-minute duo was written in Spain where the composer lived from 1972 to 1989, following four her four-year stay in Peru. Within Hannikainen’s creative span, Zafra completes a catalogue of dozen-or-so works, written between 1966 and 1985. Apart from the orchestra scores Anerfálicas (1973) and Cosmos (1977), piano takes the stage throughout the Hannikainen oeuvre, zenithing with her marvelous Piano Concerto (1976). In context, Zafra comes off as witty postlude, inviting the two players into a musical game of fast-cut mood changes and bursts of uplifting virtuosity, contrasted by moments of seductive sunlit allure.
Brilliantly performed by Suolahti and Karakorpi, the recorded take is full of spot-on reactivity and impeccable sensitivity to the musical text, resulting in colorist adventure par excellence.
Moving on in time and space, Damström’s Celestial Beings, op. 47 (2016) for violin and viola is given in exquisite rendition by its dedicatees. Cast in three movements, the fifteen minute score is vintage Damström – vivid sonic narratives woven into almost cinematic sceneries of splendid musical imagination, wholeheartedly embraced by Suolahti and Viluksela.
Commissioned by the first Musequal Festival, Celestial Beings addresses the idea of divine femininity in three dramatic episodes drawn from ancient Greek myths, making the most of its combination of two string instruments, occasionally enhanced by otherworldly lines of song, whistle and whisper.
The first portrait presents us with Aphrodite, whose birth from the waves of the sea is depicted in splendid onomatopoeia of superimposed ripples of glissandi, out of which molto espressivo e legato lines emerge in hazy dynamics. However, the tranquil mood soon gives over to bursts of quick-tempered textures, rising to one tremendous vortex, before resolving into misty coda.
Primed with pastoral opening, the central tale of Persephone assumes sulphureous overtones as the daughter of the god of grain and fruits is abducted to the Underworld to become the wife of Hades, accompanied by string noises resulting from slow bowings in high pressure. Whistles and whispers merge with string lines, as the winter months slowly pass in the Land of the Dead. Heralding a new spring, Persephone returns, breaking through the frozen landscape, setting a new cycle of seasons in motion.
In the closing movement, the two string instruments go berserk with tremolo textures, presenting us with the great headache of Zeus, out of which Athena is born, heralded by celestial migraine of lightning and thunder. Befittingly for the goddess of war, knowledge and wisdom, her presence comes in many guises, including those of snakes and spiders, all woven into the joint fabric of violin and viola with resplendent musical inspiration. The element of danger is tangible as Suolahti and Viluksela venture through the score, delivering an absolutely riveting reading.
Appearing as the perfect encore by Suolahti and Karakorpi, Leiviskä’s subtly impressionist Impromptu (1928) for violin and piano completes the album. Performed from the composer’s manuscript, the four minute piece is a veritable gem, clad in pristine colors.
The art of album at its finest, Unrecorded. documents a substantial musical program in top-tier takes, all recorded with spacious clarity and admirable sonic focus. Thanks to studio time well spent, the listener is set for a fifty-minute voyage into new musical shores. Hopefully this ship will sail far and wide.
Unrecorded.
Linda Suolahti, violin
Tiina Karakorpi, piano
Mari Viluksela, viola
Helvi Leiviskä: Violin Sonata in G minor, op. 21 (1945)
Ann-Elise Hannikainen: Zafra (1985) for violin and piano
Cecilia Damström: Celestial Beings, op. 47 (2016) for violin and viola
Helvi Leiviskä: Impromptu (1928) for violin and piano
Recorded at Nya Paviljongen, Kauniainen, Finland on 5-9 June 2023
Alba Records ABCD 528 (2023), 1 CD
© Jari Kallio
AIM - Adventures in Music 
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