That piece is simply too well-known for its personal good and is commonly performed with ineffective sentimentality. But below Mälkki’s baton, and with this orchestra — Sibelius’s sound world etched in its bones — “Finlandia” was newly disarming, modestly dignified in its touching harmonies and iron-willed fanfares.
It was a supply harking back to this system’s opener, “Lemminkäinen’s Return,” the fourth legend from Sibelius’s “Lemminkäinen Suite,” based mostly on the “Kalevala,” Finland’s nationwide epic. A quick finale to a protracted work, the “Return” is all climax, however Mälkki maintained a degree head, unleashing a little bit of fiery folks aggression right here and there, however for probably the most half emphasizing coloration and letting it bloom with grandeur that was assured somewhat than insistent.
Saariaho’s flute concerto “L’Aile du Songe,” from 2001, was a quietly private contact of programming: Mälkki, who like Saariaho lives in Paris, is a good friend and eminent interpreter of her music. And for the Carnegie efficiency, Mälkki was joined by one other earlier collaborator, the flutist Claire Chase, within the solo half. (Those two recently brought Felipe Lara’s excellent Double Concerto, which had premiered in Helsinki, to the New York Philharmonic.)
The flute — human, elemental — has been one in all Saariaho’s favored devices, for which she has written a few of her most dreamily poetic music. Here, it sings briefly phrases above suspended textures that aren’t melodies per se, however that construct to broadly expressed gestures.
In the second motion, the soloist vocalizes alongside notated enjoying, which Chase dispatched together with her trademark theatricality. She and the Finns had been satisfyingly united of their remedy of a number of the work’s most beautiful particulars: downward glissandos that evoke a rapidly passing, or maybe dying, flare of sound; a celestial gradual fade that ascends but ebbs, ultimately, to inaudibility.
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