Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara was born in a time and a place—Finland in 1928—that was dominated by the music of Jean Sibelius. He would live to succeed Sibelius as Finland’s pre-eminent living composer: a symphonist of sweeping, elemental vision who seemed to draw his inspiration from the nature, landscape and (above all) light of northern Europe. In fact, it was Sibelius who in 1955 recommended the young Rautavaara for a scholarship to the US, where the experience of living in Manhattan, as much as his teachers (who included Aaron Copland), helped him to find an independent and strikingly modern voice of his own. His Third Symphony (1961) drew widespread attention. Cantus Arcticus (1972) made Rautavaara an international name: a concerto that sets recorded Arctic birdsong against an atmospheric orchestral landscape. Rautavaara wrote operas (on subjects ranging from Finnish history to Vincent van Gogh) as well as choral works and eight symphonies. But it was in the 1980s and ’90s that he started to attract global audiences, with works that drew inspiration from nature as well as a quiet spirituality: the organ concerto Annunciations (1977), the double bass concerto Angel of Dusk (1980), the powerful Symphony No. 5 (1985) and the Symphony No. 7 (Angel of Light) (1994). He continued to compose up to his death in 2016, when his pupils—including the composers Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kalevi Aho—led worldwide tributes.