Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg is a major voice in European music.
(Hanya chlala)
A bit like cities along the ancient Silk Road, there is a form of cultural exchange that takes place these days between Boston and New York. The Boston Early Music Festival exports its programs down to New York's Morgan Library, and Columbia University's Miller Theater sends its evenings of contemporary music up to be heard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It's tempting to imagine two caravans passing on the Merritt Parkway, one packed with recorders and sackbuts, the other with laptops and leather pants.
Or as the case may be this week, metal chains and styrofoam. That industrial cargo is part of an incoming shipment from New York, as the International Contemporary Ensemble prepares to take the Gardner stage on Thursday night for the next installment of the Composer Portraits series. The subject this time around is the opulent sound world of Magnus Lindberg.
This 49-year-old Finnish compos er is a major voice in European music, but one that is heard all too rarely in this country. His most recent large-scale work, "Seht die Sonne," was paired with Mahler's Ninth Symphony and performed this fall at Carnegie Hall by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. He also wrote a ravishing violin concerto for Lisa Batiashvili that was premiered in 2006. He is best known as a composer for orchestra, but Thursday's program of smaller ensemble works should still provide a welcome overview, beginning with a 1981 piece called "Linea d'ombra."
It was the very first work that Lindberg wrote after completing his formal training at the Sibelius Academy, and the music sounds almost giddy with its own expressive possibility. The piece opens with two musicians literally screaming from the stage, and ends with scrambled words from an Italian poem whispered incomprehensibly. Near the end, there's also the sound of a tam-tam being plied by metal chains, hunks of styrofoam, and cardboard tubes taken from a roll of paper towels. Somehow it all coheres - and tautly. "It's a piece," said Lindberg recently by phone from Berlin, "that was done out of the pure joy of being a free composer."
Some 25 years later, Lindberg these days writes works with fewer metal chains and decidedly less screaming but his music still careens with an intoxicating sense of freedom. He belongs to a generation of composers that inherited the solemn rites and rigors of post-war modernism and struggled to transform them into a personal language that could speak beyond the ivory tower. Few have succeeded as organically or with as much surface brilliance as Lindberg.
He wields a technical arsenal of enormous sophistication but his music never comes across as arid or brainy. Saturated with color and textural detail and brimming with a remarkable density of sound, his best works address themselves to a broad audience without descending into a pallid or pandering neo-Romanticism. He is a master of concluding strokes that unlock the mystery of what has just transpired, and few composers can so artfully wed moments of surprise with a forward-rushing sense of destination. And finally, as his various concertos testify, he has created some of the most strikingly virtuosic music for orchestra and solo instruments of the last 20 years.
Lindberg grew up in Helsinki in a home that was not especially musical. As a young boy he was first given an accordion but quickly moved to the piano. His father's computer skills as a systems analyst for
After more study in the early '80s, Lindberg found himself in Berlin, where he indulged his appetite for musical extremes. He went to see the German art-noise band Einstürzende Neubauten, whose name translates as "collapsing new buildings," and watched performers on stage with street drills. The band's punk energy and its preference for junkyard percussion found its way into Lindberg's own audacious breakthrough work "Kraft," completed in 1985.
These days, Lindberg divides his time between Finland and Berlin. As his sumptuously scored Violin Concerto suggests, he has traveled far from the days of scrap metal and vastly expanded his map of musical influences. When asked about his journey, Lindberg concedes the evolution in his style but is quick to add that his fundamental approach has not changed.
"I never did anything on a reactionary basis or felt a big rupture with my avant-garde or modernistic thoughts," he said. "As a younger composer, I at least tried to invent some new aesthetics and so forth. Today, you view your own oeuvre in a larger context, but on a deeper structural level, and on a deeper temperamental level, I somehow feel that I'm working with the same project I have always believed in."
However one defines that project, Thursday's program will sample from its different stages. The program will include the "Duo Concertante" from 1992; the lavishly conceived Clarinet Quintet, which also dates from 1992; and was written for the extraordinary Finnish clarinetist Kari Kriikku; and the "Piano Jubilees," written in 2000 in honor of Pierre Boulez's birthday. Then of course there's the early "Linea d'ombra," which took the crack players of the International Contemporary Ensemble many rehearsals to master but will now be featured on an ICE album to be released later this year. "It's wildly virtuosic and very gestural," said ICE percussionist David Schotzko. "The feeling is that the instruments can barely contain what Magnus wants to say."
A fuller Lindberg portrait would include the seminal "Kraft" and other works for orchestra, but this tasting menu at least suggests the arc of an important composer who has tempered his radicalism without reining in his imagination. "However pragmatic one becomes," said Lindberg, with a distinct echo of Mahler, "the starting point of composition should still always be the utopia, the huge vision of creating a new universe."
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
