Einojuhani Rautavaara
Yuja Wang was the star we’d all come to seeat San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall last Sunday afternoon. A change in programming had rewarded us in dividends; she’d be performing not just one but two piano concertos. For most of the audience, I’m guessing, it was Ravel’s intense Piano Concerto for the Left Hand that held the bigger draw. Count me in their number. But a new—to me—composer and concerto caught my eye: twentieth-century Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara and his Piano Concerto No. 1.
Sunday afternoon’s program commenced with Debussy’s Images pour orchestra, which was tidily split into two, the shorter “Gigues” and “Rondes de printemps” in the first half (with the three-movement “Iberia” concluding the program), followed by Ravel’s Piano Concerto in D major for the Left Hand. You can read about Yuja’s 2018 performance of this HERE; both then and now, she crushed it.
After intermission came Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Composed in 1969, it starts with a thundering piano solo that harbors both lyrical melody and dissonance at the same time. Instantly you’re hurled into Rautavaara’s musical world which, I have to say, is not a world I’ve been in before. Not like this. And lest you think this means the concerto will prove to be atonal or too avant-garde for your tastes and you might not even bother to read further, much less give the concerto a listen, let me assure you. There is such beauty and originality in this work, it will blow you away. Just in an unprecedented way.
Let’s talk about the composer first. Einojuhani Rautavaara was born in 1928 in Helsinki, coming of age in the post-WW II era. To get a full picture of what that meant for the young, aspiring composer, here’s a good description from John Mauceri’s The War on Music:
A number of young, creative people growing up in a devastated Europe embraced a new, unemotional, and intellectually challenging music. Their young lives emanated from a cold, dark place that demanded rules (new rules) to make sense of life and culture after a war they barely understood but the effects of which were everywhere to be found. […]
After two world wars, there was a sense of numbness in that post-traumatic world. A new musical universe, justified by complex intellectual structures rather than emotionality, offered a certain artistic protection within the chaos. In retrospect, we can offer another conclusion: that this dissonant music is redolent of loss—of family, home and community—forcibly removing a population from its recent past transgressions. It was music as medicine—it tastes terrible, but deep down it will do you good.
So that was the climate of young Rautavaara’s world as he came of age and went on to study composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Thereafter came a grant from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation to train in the U.S. with Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions at Tanglewood, and Vincent Persichetti at the Julliard School, where he began to develop his own distinct, eclectic sound. Consider that 12-tone serialism and avant-garde were the music styles being fervently embraced. Rautavaara saw merit in them, and in neoclassicism, and all of it contributed to that unique sound of his. Eventually he grew tired of the limitations of serialism and began to lean toward the neo-Romanticism that we hear in his Concerto No. 1. “I wanted in my concerto to restore the entire rich grandeur of the instrument.” he once explained. “To write a concerto in ‘the grand style.’”
In that, he succeeded wildly. Just in unexpected ways.
The opening plunges you in, where you will instantly discover what a tone cluster sounds like. (Clue: think of a toddler playing the piano, mashing their hands on four white keys at once.) It creates a distinctly plonky sound (my word, not the music world’s) that is equal parts dissonant and melodic. The left hand is doing a beautiful glissando thing over the lower keys, giving it a fluid, shimmery sound. The end result is so weirdly satisfying.
The orchestra and the piano carry on a dialogue, with lots of space for the piano’s query and the orchestra’s full-throated response. As the intensity increases, approaching the end of the first movement, the pianist “is instructed to slam their arm on the keyboard to simulate a three-octave wide cluster chord.” I watched, slack-jawed as Yuja implemented this, her entire right forearm and elbow on the white keys, a plonky tone-cluster on steroids. It was both jarring and aesthetically perfect. I began to laugh out loud, in something akin to exhilaration at its outrageousness.
The second movement is far more tranquil, almost mystical. It begins as the higher-register stringed instruments (violin and viola) summon and sustain a lone C note, an eerily beautiful drone as Yuja played a melody line, spare and pensive, with ample breathing space. The strings held their C note for a full three full minutes while the piano’s melody gradually grew more rhapsodic. The strings finally returned to life, enhancing the melodic line in a way that made my heart soar. It was cinematic. Soul-stirring. Most decidedly the sweeping Romanticism Rautavaara had wanted to incorporate into his compositions.
The second movement segues into the third without pause and we are back to a high-octane frenzy, Yuja and the orchestra racing the concerto to its thundering conclusion, to a unison roar of approval from the audience. Or maybe not unison, now that I think of it. Some people were still flung back in their seats, expressions stunned, probably still trying to figure out what hit them.
Yuja Wang
I continue to be so deeply impressed at what a rare yet natural performer Yuja Wang is. She allows herself to be swept away by the music in a way that never compromises her technique, her commitment to detail. She can exchange delicacy with fire and fury from moment to moment. The energy that radiates from her seems inexhaustible.
This became even more clear in her encores, to which she treated us to not one but two. (Yay, us!) When she came out for the second encore, she seemed as happy about it as we were. And what a treat it was: a piano arrangement of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pathetique”). Her two hands delivered the sounds and textures of a full orchestra condensed into one instrument. It was sensational.
Don’t miss a chance to see this extraordinary artist (whom I also wrote about HERE), and if you can catch her in a performance of the Rautavaara Piano Concerto No. 1, consider yourself doubly lucky. And tell me below afterward what you thought of it.
Here’s the concerto on YouTube (the comments are entertaining, insightful and well worth a read):
And if you’re the type who needs to see it to believe it, I’ve got you covered too. Go HERE for proof that the pianist really does have to play that three-octave cluster passage with her forearm.
P.S.: If you’re like me and always want to know how a difficult name is really pronounced instead of your garbled effort, HERE is a charming tutorial on how to pronounce Rautavaara’s name.
Republished with gracious permission from The Classical Girl (February 2025).
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The featured image, uploaded by Ottoklemperer1885, is a photograph of The National Youth Orchestra of China performing with Yuja Wang at Carnegie Hall on July 22, 2017, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image of Einojuhani Rautavaara, uploaded by Laivakoira2015, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
