Nicholas Daniel, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Nicholas Collon - Tarkiainen: Midnight Sun Variations & Other (2024) [24/96]

Outi Tarkiainen (b. 1985) has rapidly risen to the ranks of Finland’s internationally most successful composers. Born in Lapland, the landscape of this mystic Arctic region has proved a constant source of inspiration for her. This new album by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Nicholas Collon featuring Nicholas Daniel as soloist, includes some of the composer’s most recent orchestral works, including Midnight Sun Variations commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic and by the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada, and premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019. Outi Tarkiainen’s works are marked by strong atmosphere and rich orchestral textures.

Midnight Sun Variations (2019) is not a set of variations in the traditional sense, with an identifiable theme that is then varied; instead, it is a process where nature renews itself both as an entire ecosystem and as a personal and physical manifestation of the birth of a new human life. In the orchestral texture, we can identify Sibelian motifs, filigree-like wind writing, string fields and scintillating percussion shot through with the dwindling light of an Arctic summer. All these details are bound together by the overall dramatic arc that descends from its culmination to the start of something new.

Commissioned by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Songs of the Ice (2019) is a sibling work to Midnight Sun Variations, and the two may be performed separately or together in whichever order. Here, too, the music stems from natural phenomena in the Arctic region and reminds us that humans are only a part of the cycle of nature and belong to nature. Ice can be permanent, hard polar ice, but the cycle of seasons and climate change can also render it fragile and transitory.

Milky Ways (2022), a Concerto for cor anglais and orchestra, was jointly commissioned by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and BBC Radio 3, and it is dedicated to oboist Nicholas Daniel “in memory of his dear mother”. The Ancient Finns called the Milky Way literally ‘track of the bird’. The Ancient Greeks, on the other hand, thought that the belt of stars across the sky resembled milk, and it is from the Greek word for milk (gála) that we get the word ‘galaxy’. The concerto takes its title rather literally, in reference to breastfeeding an infant.

The Ring of Fire and Love (2020) was premiered by the Royal Swedish Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo. The setting for this piece is more exotic than in Tarkiainen’s previous works. The common elements here are the inseparability of humans and nature and the formative experiences that establish us as a part of nature. Here, again, the link between the geothermal and human contexts is the birth of a child, which is not often addressed in music.

Tracklist:
1. Midnight Sun Variations (10:28)
2. Songs of the Ice (12:18)
3. Milky Ways: I. The Infant Gaze (6:55)
4. Milky Ways: II. Interplays (4:54)
5. Milky Ways: III. At the Fountainhead of God (9:46)
6. The Ring of Fire and Love (10:15)


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