00:04 1. Elegia
03:58 2. Burlesco
05:43 3. Rêverie
09:37 4. Valse miniature
Itaru Ogawa, piano
Recording from the pianist's RU-vid channel: • Aarre Merikanto: 4 Pia...
Aarre Merikanto (1893-1958) was a Finnish composer, the son of the prominent Romantic composer Oskar Merikanto. Initially influenced by the prevailing national Romantic style at the time in Finland, Merikanto migrated toward a more modernist idiom in the 1920s, drawing influences from Expressionism and developing a strain of non-tonal music independent of the twelve-tone system; in this period, he was - along with Väinö Raitio and Ernest Pingoud - a leading light of Finnish modernism.
Despite moderate success in central Europe, Merikanto's modernist music was never popular with the conservative Finnish public during his lifetime. Discouraged by this negative reception, Merikanto began writing in a more traditional Neoclassical style in the last 25 years of his life and even destroyed many of his earlier pieces. However, his work as both a composer and a teacher at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki was recognized after his death; he taught many important figures among the next generation of Finnish composers, including Einojuhani Rautavaara and Paavo Heininen, and it was Heininen who reconstructed some of the works Merikanto had destroyed. Today, Merikanto's music is becoming increasingly well-represented on concert programs in Finland, where several of his works have been performed and recorded by major orchestras.
This collection of four piano pieces dates from the late 1910s, before Merikanto's stylistic shift toward modernism. However, they are finely crafted and very individual in their own right, and some of the more chromatic harmonic language already offers hints at his mature style.
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14 окт 2024
