Rautavaara: Book of Visions [Hybrid SACD] [Hybrid SACD, SACD]

Rautavaara seems to be on plane where his recent works are all, as the other reviewer seems to state, have a tendency to sound the same. This is true, if you only listen to them once or twice, but as with all composers who have a distinctive voice the more you listen the more you learn and appreciate. take book of visions for example. It is actually a marvelous piece-the third movement is one of the most beautiful and remarkable pieces Rautavaara has composed, but I didnt notice this the first few times I listened. It wasnt until I heard it by accident well after I had written it off. When I heard it on the radio, I couldnt believe my ears--and then to find out it was a piece I had thrown into my own personal "classical concentration camp."
So I revisited the CD as a whole-and I find it to be remarkable.
I cant argue with the fact that all of his music is starting-or does- sound the same now. But that is his voice, and yoou can tell a rautavaara piece just like you can tell a mozart piece, or a Haydn piece, or a beethoven piece........(not comparisons). either way-this is a fine disc, it just takes time to appreciate-and I find that the music I love the best didnt always hit me the first time(like Wagner or Prokofiev, or Poulenc) Music that you love immediately tends to wane pretty fast.
This is accessible modern music, meaning that this isnt atonal strategic noise, or bleep-bloop anti-beauty music-in fact it is the opposite and I recommend it thoroughly.

This 2005 release of music by Einojuhani Rautavaara might seem like a big deal with its dual SACD/CD layer and three world premieres with big fan Mikko Franck conducting the National Orchestra of Belgium. Yet, as with so much of Rautavaara's late music, people are going to end up cursing themselves for seeking out the disc when the music on it is so meagre, light, fluffy, insubstantial etc. (I was lucky to listen to a library copy).

Take "Book of Visions" (2003/2005) for example. Fourty full minutes of long drawn-out string lines over a pedal point, with no meaningful development. Occasionally Rautavaara will throw in some rumbling percussion to spice things up, but the lack of direction is painfully obvious throughout. I fail to understand why the conservatives hold up Rautavaara as an ideal modern composer when his music has so much less, well, *musical* content than the greats of the classical era. Maybe the fad is over, as at a recent Helsinki performance of "Book of Visions" people started walking out and one listener called it a "book of monotony". The short "Adagio Celeste" for string orchestra (1997/2000) is more of the same. Indeed, I'd challenge a Rautavaara fan to tell a snippet of it from "Book of Visions", the composer's last two symphonies, or "Isle of Bliss".

There is one piece here which is somewhat more interesting. Rautavaara wrote his Symphony No. 1 in 1955, and both the first version and a 1988 revision have been widely recorded before. In 2003, however, he revised the piece yet again to add a slow movement between the two main ones, though as the slow movement is based on a song he wrote in the '50s the spirit of the piece is preserved. The piece is highly reminiscent of Shostakovich, whom the young Finnish modernists of those times admired. This piece is completely listenable, although one feels it is more the fulfillment of a student's assignment to imitate the Russian composer than a significant new acheivement.

The liner notes consist of Rautavaara's own comments on the music, which as common with his late works are described as emanating from some other, metaphysical realm and only transmitted to us by the composer. I'd have to say that if this is true, the divine is boring indeed.