Simone Lamsma, Malmö Symphony Orchestra & Robert Trevino - Lost Landscapes (2022) [Hi-Res]

Conductor Robert Trevino's fourth album release on Ondine focuses on the late works of composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016), one of the most famous Finnish composers after Sibelius and known worldwide for his neo-romantic, even mystical compositions. Together with violinist Simone Lamsma and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, the artists present four last orchestral works by the famous composer. Two of the works are world premiere recordings.

In his late creative period, Rautavaara received several requests from leading violinists of the world asking him to write works for them. He accommodated them and created several extensive works for solo violin. Fantasia (2015) for violin and orchestra is a work with soft neo-romantic harmonies and floating melodic lines. The overall mood is one of pastoral serenity. In 2014, Rautavaara was asked to write a new violin concerto. This commission resulted in Deux Sérénades for violin and orchestra, which remained unfinished at Rautavaara's death: the second movement was sketched, but only the beginning was orchestrated. Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), an accomplished composer of symphonies and concertos who studied composition with Rautavaara in the late 1970s, completed the orchestration in 2018. Especially in the first serenade, Sérénade pour mon amour, the orchestration is achingly beautiful in its unrestricted floating romantic melodic flow, delicately balancing on the threshold between the warmth of love and the melancholy of farewell. Lost Landscapes (2005 / 15) was originally written as a violin sonata, but Rautavaara began orchestrating the work in 2013. The first movement was premiered at the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival in July 2015, but the work's full premiere took place in Malmö in March 2021, with Simone Lamsma as soloist. In the Beginning (2015) is a concise, overture-like work commissioned for an opening concert. The titles of his works were important to the composer, as they formed part of the "aura" of the work and often even provided the initial impetus for writing the piece. In this case, the composer might have meant a dream or the impression of a new beginning in another dimension. The ending is not final, but leaves the listener with the expectation of what might come next.