Countless composers have incorporated birdsong into their music, from Beethoven to Ottorino Respighi to — most famously — Olivier Messiaen. But the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara went one step further than them all by having his own field recordings of birds star as the solo instrument in his 1972 piece Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra.
Fittingly, Berkeley Symphony Music Director Joseph Young chose Rautavaara’s work to open the orchestra’s concert, dubbed “Spring’s Awakening,” on Sunday, March 16, at First Congregational Church of Berkeley.
Cantus Arcticus is a magical and touching composition that, over three movements, calls out to Finland’s landscape and natural beauty. The first movement, “The Bog,” opens with birdsong alone. The instrumental entrances come in the form of a long, lithe flute duet, played with fluid and seamless beauty on Sunday afternoon by Stacey Pelinka and Laurie Seibold.
The piece also harkens back to other 20th-century masterworks. Early on, there’s a passage whose wind flutterings bears more than a passing resemblance to the opening of Igor Stravinsky’s monumental The Rite of Spring, which itself would have been at home on Sunday’s program. At the entrance of the lower strings, “The Bog” settles into a weightiness reminiscent of Jean Sibelius, and you find yourself thinking of that composer’s Symphony No. 2 — and perhaps the deep forests of Finland.
The start of Rautavaara’s second movement, “Melancholy,” makes the allusion deliberate, with divided strings playing tremolo, much like the opening of Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela. Here, the birdsong is that of the shore lark, but slowed down to drop its pitch by about two octaves.
The concerto’s final movement, “Swans Migrating,” incorporates a recording of Finnish whooper swans. From this continuous, nearly overwhelming natural sound, the orchestra emerges one instrument at a time. A celesta melody weaves its way around the birdsong and wind instruments. This movement calls viscerally to the subconscious and opens the listener’s heart from within.
Next on the program was Huang Ruo’s Tipping Point: A Climate-Crisis Symphony, which makes a direct call to action, opening with the percussive ticking of a woodblock above a speech given by the late U.S. Senator James Inhofe, a notorious climate-change denier. Is that a clock counting the seconds, minutes, hours to the point of no return?
You bet it is. The woodblock ticks constantly during the first and third sections of Tipping Point, which is not a subtle work at all. It’s largely written in a minimalist style. The beginning is on the blocky side, with big orchestral chords punctuating Inhofe’s speech in what seems to be a long, anticipatory introduction with fairly slow harmonic movement. The middle section has more harmonic progression and many small textural and instrumental changes.
The final section is far too long and far too repetitive, sometimes feeling stuck in place. Like Cantus Arcticus, the music alludes to Stravinsky, this time Petrushka. Tipping Point closes with a recording of a forest wildfire that creeps into the symphonic texture and persists after the orchestra dies away. This piece, however, has little of the power and breathtaking originality of a work like Gabriella Smith’s Breathing Forests, which invokes fire with only the instruments of the orchestra.
The concert closed with an ebullient performance of Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 (“Spring”). Young’s vivid conception of the work brought out all of the moods and colors in the score, and he handled the numerous tempo transitions with aplomb. But balances were poor throughout, owing to the resonant acoustics of First Church’s sanctuary, which essentially allowed the orchestra’s sound to bounce around and cover itself. The brass almost always drowned out the strings, obscuring much of Schumann’s beautiful melodic counterpoint.
Young is leaving Berkeley Symphony after this season, but there are two more chances to hear him. The first is at the orchestra’s Spring Gala, scheduled for May 10 at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Kensington. Young’s last concert is June 1 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall and is set to feature works by Gity Razaz, Astor Piazzolla, and Dmitri Shostakovich.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
