Finnish on a High Note

“The Finnish are coming,” screams the Ojai Festival advertising campaign. It’s an irresistible marketing hook for the annual musical event: Esa-Pekka Salonen has taken the reins as the 1999 guest music director and liberally stocked the program with artists and works from his home country.

“I’ve always felt that it’s important to, once and for all, do something to let people outside Finland know the immensity of Finnish musical talent,” says Ernest Fleischmann, Salonen’s recently retired boss at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and now the artistic director at Ojai.

The Finnish roster for the festival--which has been expanded to five days rather than the usual three--includes Magnus Lindberg as composer in residence, cellist Anssi Kartunnen, the renegade Toimii Ensemble (among whose members are Salonen, Lindberg and Kartunnen) and pianist Olli Mustonen.

With Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, they’ll offer up, among other composers, the work of Lindberg (including two U.S. premieres), Kaija Saariaho (a Finn now based at IRCAM in Paris), Sibelius (Symphony No. 1) and a certain other binational composer-conductor. On Friday, Salonen’s “Giro” will get its U.S. premiere, along with the world premiere of his song cycle “Sappho Fragments.”

Despite the concentration of Finnish musical energies, Salonen makes clear that the festival is not a survey. “This is a very narrow and specific segment of Finnish music,” he said, “which involves a few composers of my own generation.” He started designing the program, in fact, around the U.S. premiere of his longtime ally Lindberg’s elaborate orchestra plus solo-ensemble piece “Kraft.”

“My first thought was that it would be wonderful to do ‘Kraft’ in the beautiful landscape of Ojai,” Salonen recalls. “Then, the rest of the program sort of grew around that. The Finnish ‘invasion’ happened almost automatically, because, if you do ‘Kraft,’ you need the [Toimii] ensemble in addition to the orchestra.”

The result is that the real star at Ojai will be the Finnish music machine. Consider the numbers: This 80-year-old country, with a population of 5 million (just over half that of L.A. County), boasts 30 orchestras, 15 of which are full-time professional ensembles. Each year, its 50-plus arts festivals--which emphasize music, especially classical music--attract more than a million visitors.

Finland has produced a passel of young star conductors--from Salonen to Jukka-Pekka Saraste in Toronto, and the latest, Sakari Oramo, who made an auspicious local debut with the Philharmonic a few weeks ago and is following Simon Rattle as leader of England’s City of Birmingham Symphony. Finland has produced Grammy nominees (Salonen as a conductor, composer Einojuhani Rautavarra, for “Angel of Light,” a top-selling 1994 CD in the minimalist mode of Arvo Part or Henryk Gorecki) and such internationally known solo performers as Mustonen and singers Jorma Hynninen, Monica Groop and Matti Salminen.

“On a per capita basis,” claims Fleischmann, “there are more people involved in music in Finland than anywhere else, and probably more practicing musicians of international caliber than anywhere else.”

It’s “an amazing phenomenon,” he continues. “We’re just seeing the tip of an immense iceberg at Ojai.”

Any examination of the Finnish music boom leads back to Jean Sibelius, born in 1865, the first Finnish composer to gain international renown. Identified with the Finnish independence

movement (Finland became a nation in 1919) and championed at home and abroad for such works as “Finlandia” and his First and Second symphonies, Sibelius was Finland, in much the same way that Churchill came to be identified with Great Britain, according to biographer Robert Layton.

The impact on Finnish culture has been profound. As Fleischmann says: “If a composer can become a national hero, then music must be something important.”

Pekka Hako, who has headed the Finnish Musical Information Center for 10 years, points to Finland’s elaborate public education system, which includes programs to identify young talent and nurture it in music institutes and conservatories, and at the highest level, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

The Sibelius Academy groomed Salonen and practically every other Finnish musician of international note. It started as a private conservatory in 1882 (Sibelius attended from 1885-1890) but became a state school in 1966, supported by the ministry of education and offering free tuition.

The centralization of musical training has created a tight network that carries the Finnish flag all over the world. Ojai is just one example. Mustonen and Salonen recently performed the Ravel Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic. Lindberg and Salonen were together this spring in Paris giving the premiere of Lindberg’s Cello Concerto (on the Friday night Ojai program). Last year, Salonen participated in a Sibelius Academy conductors’ residency at Carnegie Hall that matched his famous coach Jorma Panula with an international field of nine handpicked students.

In addition to the schools, the Finnish government supports music in other ways--with stipends paid to musicians, a public library system that stocks scores and CDs, state-run radio and TV stations whose playlists concentrate on the home team, and the well-organized, state-funded festival circuit that has proliferated in the past 25 years. Finland’s are among the most important music festivals in Europe: in classical, the Helsinki Festival and the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival; in jazz, the cutting-edge Tampere Jazz Happening.

All of which makes music a “part of our everyday life,” says Hako. For example, the medium of opera has taken off in Finland in the past couple of decades--there are 11 regional companies--partly due to the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Where opera in the U.S. tends to exist in its own marginalized cultural dimension, far from the unwashed masses, in Finland now “a

new opera is always news in the media,” says Hako.

He also suggests that such a generalized cultural emphasis may be “typical of a small country, because it’s a way of creating our own identity.”

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Historically, what Sibelius wrought was a distinct establishment and a solid symphonic tradition. In particular, such composers as Joonas Kokkonen, born in 1921, and his student Aulis Sallinen, born in 1935, toyed with outside influences but essentially followed the great man’s structures and themes. (Rautavarra, another direct Sibelius heir, developed a different musical language but was also a member of the Finnish establishment.)

Salonen and Lindberg, however, represent a younger, upstart generation of composers. The two of them were born three days apart in June 1958. Both came up through the Finnish educational system, studying together at the Sibelius Academy, where Sallinen, Kokkonen and Rautavarra had studied and taught. And both felt the need to challenge the established order.

One target was what Salonen describes as “symphonies of ‘weight.’ ” “We were very suspicious of people who wrote symphonies,” he explains, “because they were also the successful ones. My generation felt that if you were successful, you have already compromised something. In my dreams, I still see myself as a part of an anti-establishment movement, which is a really naive thought considering my position in the music world at the moment. But still, I find it much more stimulating to be against something rather than trying to preserve something.”

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Salonen, Lindberg, Saariaho and others were involved in forming such entities as the Ears Open Society, the Avanti! Ensemble (now a fixture of Finnish music) and the anarchic Toimii Ensemble, intent on pursuing the abstractions and models of the international avant-garde.

Hako calls Toimii an emblem of an era of musical change in Finland, a “laboratory for composers and musicians to do crazy things, especially Esa-Pekka and Magnus.” The name, says Salonen, translates as “it functions.” Its eight members are currently scattered around the world, engaged in their own careers.

“Once we get together, it’s a rare occasion, and that minimizes the amount of fighting,” Salonen says with a laugh. “It’s a non-prestigious forum, so you can bring really rough ideas in and work on them together, to see if there is anything that could be developed into something more. Composers rarely have this opportunity these days, so we are grateful that this exists.”

Inevitably, the question arises about what will come next. Salonen points to the presence of a talented crop of younger composers, but one that’s less iconoclastic.

“So far, they haven’t publicly attacked us,” he says and chuckles. “I don’t think a young composer in his or her 20s feels the need to represent an aesthetic the same way we felt 20 years ago. The whole thing is much freer. In a sense, the Finnish climate at the moment is very receptive to young composers’ efforts, and I feel a certain pride, myself, that the work we did in the ‘70s and ‘80s actually has made it possible for young composers to have a slightly easier situation.”

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If Finland uses music to create an identity, what emerges from the results?

Once again, you have to start with Sibelius. In broad terms, the country’s signature has been a romantic link to myth and nature, not surprising given its famous lakes, islands and great northern forests. Fleischmann muses that Finland’s “overlong, over-cold winters” must have something to do with its musical output. As for Sibelius, who made nature poems as well as Finnish epics the basis of many of his works: “No other composer brings to life so vividly the wildness and grandeur of the north,” Layton writes.

Not surprisingly, Salonen and his peers have had something else in mind, leading Finnish music out of the dark, brooding forest. The rebels of Ears Open made a point of leaving home to soak up other approaches (Lindberg like Saariaho is particularly associated with IRCAM in Paris; Salonen spent time in Italy before making L.A. his second home).

“As a Finnish composer, you involuntarily get compared to other Nordic music,” Lindberg told The Times last year, as his orchestral piece “Fresco” was about to get its world premiere with the L.A. Philharmonic. “So from the beginning you start thinking in terms of being part of the Western European and American music scenery, of liking complexity and structures and systems.”

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Lindberg’s “structures and systems” involve the use of the computer and the creation of abstract music. Yet The Times’ Mark Swed heard in “Fresco” “an apt evocation . . . of the cosmos” as well as the “strong sense of a machine.”

Pianist Mustonen, a bit younger than Lindberg and Salonen, is a composer as well as a solo performer, but he’s known more for bold dealings with standard repertory than compositional rebellion. (His keynote performance in Ojai will be a recital of his customized set of preludes and fugues by Bach and Shostakovich, which were recently released by BMG/RCA Red Seal in Europe to rave reviews.) He sees in his countrymen’s music a reflection of its unique language.

“We have such a strange language,” he said, speaking from his home, an hour outside of Helsinki. “There are only 5 million people who understand [it, but] music is an international language, so it seems natural that [Finns] are directed toward music.

“But Finnish is also a very musical language. When children are learning to speak, there are distinct elements. In the pronunciation, we have a strong rhythm in the language.” He offers some examples.

“Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste”--he says the names with a sharp, syncopated enunciation. “When you speak Finnish properly, you have to be very precise with the rhythm. That’s what children learn when they learn to speak. This is a very good thing for music.

“Also, we have very clear, distinct colors of vowels. I’ve always felt it’s very good training for the analytical ear.

“In the musical scene, we are all different people, of course, but there is a certain preference for clarity of sounds, and I think it might have something to do with the language.”

The very first major work of Finnish music was Sibelius’ “Kullervo” Symphony (1892). Based on the epic poem “Kalevala,” it was a central inspiration for the Finnish nationalist movement, and music and poem are still Finland 101 material today. It even contains an explanation for Finnish musical proclivities.

Among other tales, it tells the story of the hero playing a plucked-string instrument he has made out of a giant pike.

“He plays so movingly,” recounts Mustonen, “that all the animals in the forest and the fish in the sea, and even the moon, come to listen to him for days and days, with tears in their eyes.”

For Mustonen, it’s a story that “gives the idea that art [or] music is not [just] some embellishment in life, some entertainment. It is one of the reasons that we live. It symbolizes the fact that, even for the ancient Finnish people, music and poetry were something very central in their lives.”