Schumann's Spring Symphony

A hymn to the sea that demands everything of the choir

We begin by turning our eyes to our Nordic neighbor to the east, and two Finnish composers who can be said to have a penchant for a darker, more difficult tonality. Despite his tragic, untimely death at the end of the Finnish Civil War, Toivo Kuula managed to make a significant impression through his complex but at the same time emotional compositions. After the acclaimed debut concert in Helsinki in 1908, he led the choir abroad, including to Italy, where he received an order from the conductor Klemetti for a larger polyphonic work intended to be performed at the choir Suomen Laulu’s 10th anniversary. But the result was not at all what Klemetti had expected. Inspired by Eino Leino’s poetry collection Hella (Frost), an excited Kuula created the extensive work Meren virsi – an evocative hymn to the sea but also almost unsingable. Kuula was therefore forced to provide the piece with piano accompaniment, and after his death it was also reworked by the composer Leevi Madetoja into a somewhat simpler version for choir and orchestra. In this concert, however, the Swedish Radio Choir undertakes the original, demanding a cappella version, coloured by Kuula’s expansive, folk-inspired sound world as well as the poem’s sucking, hypnotic desire to be engulfed by the powerful roar of the eternal waves.

Jaakko Kuusisto’s acrobatic cello concerto

A similar atmosphere characterises fellow countryman Jaakko Kuusisto’s innovative cello concerto from 2019. Star cellist Jan-Erik Gustafsson – a big name in the classical music world since his fine placing in the EBU Competition for Young Musicians in 1986 – takes on music that acrobatically moves between elegant contemplation, something ghostly condensed, and pure, wild improvisation. The same versatility characterised Jaakko Kuusisto’s entire artistic career, where as both conductor, violinist and composer, he freely moved between everything from baroque to film music. Kuusisto was also deeply involved in Finnish society and cultural life, which is not least noticeable in his many imaginative operas with a connection to the country’s history: the family performance of the national epic Kalevala, the portrayal of the life of composer Oskar Merikanto (Elämälle) and his very last opera Ice (Jää), based on the award-winning book by Ulla-Lena Lundberg.

I long into myself. – Wilhelm Stenhammar

Stenhammar and Schumann celebrate spring

The second half of the concert is entirely dedicated to spring, with compositions that paint this symbol-saturated season in very different colours and moods. Wilhelm Stenhammar never achieved the same international recognition as Grieg or Sibelius, but in return gave us Swedes choral treasures such as I Seraillets Have and Sverige – perhaps the closest one can get to a national anthem. And it was also in the familiar landscapes and urban environments that Stenhammar felt most comfortable: “I long into myself,” he wrote in a letter to Sibelius in 1904, whose second symphony had given him such self-doubt that he withdrew his own first symphony. Stenhammar composed in most genres, although it was in the small format that he excelled: in chamber music and the many songs, often compositions by poets of his time, among them Oscar Levertin’s Two Poems. Vårnatt (Spring night) is usually performed with choir and piano, but here we hear the slightly more unusual orchestral arrangement accompanying the vocal parts. Shimmering female voices begin by singing about the beautiful, white spring, about its sun and sprouts, which “give hearts everything they desire”. But the song also contains a melancholy, reflected in the description of the broken strings and the longing to “become ashes in an urn”.

Robert Schumann’s first symphony in B flat major, also called the Spring Symphony, is all the more exuberant and uninhibited in its light. Schumann seems to have written the work in a kind of euphoria at the beginning of 1841 – his symphonic year – after finally being able to marry his wife Clara after a long and drawn-out legal process. It was also she who urged him, who had until then focused mostly on piano and vocal music, to take on the more challenging orchestral repertoire. And Schumann seems to have taken her at her word. The symphony was outlined at a furious pace in just four days and orchestrated shortly thereafter. Schumann initially gave the four movements titles related to different aspects of spring (“Beginning of Spring”, “Evening”, “Happy Playmates”, “Full Spring”) but then removed them again. However, this does not prevent the sensation of nature awakening to the opening bell and how the world then turns green and takes off in the ecstatic energy of the first movement. The second movement is a sweet twilight song, and in the scherzo a march and dance theme exchange playful dialogues. In the finale, spring has finally reached its full saturation. As the last line of the poem by the poet Adolph Böttger that is said to have inspired the literary-interested Schumann reads:

Oh, turn, turn from your path – in the valley the spring bursts forth!

Text: Fredrica Roos (translated by Anna Rickman)