 Renate Eggebrecht a consacré une grande partie de sa discographie à enregistrer brillamment des raretés, ce que nous apprécions particulièrement : le volume 10 est consacré à la musique finlandaise pour violon seul. Et parmi celle-ci, la sonate de Kalevi Aho. Pièce majeure de l'album, il est intéressant de voir comment un contemporain conserve un regard vers l'incontournable Bach en matière de violon solo. Le mouvement I reprend la base de la chaconne, le troisième démarre sur le B.A.C.H. qui clôt l'ultime più mosso. Mais au-delà de l'hommage, la richesse évocatrice de Aho est permanente par des effets puissants – par exemple l'espèce d'aspiration vers les ultimes aigus de l'instrument ou la double corde pizzicato sonnant comme un glas. Moins intéressant et plus scolaire, la Variétude de son maître en musique Rautavaara, et plus difficile la sonate de Nordgren, compositeurs dont il vaudra mieux connaître l’œuvre orchestrale. L'hommage funèbre de Aho à ce dernier reprend à son compte les impressions de la sonate. Si le disque reste en marge de leurs productions symphoniques où les finlandais sont des maîtres incontestés, il est néanmoins utile de les écouter en solo pour les approfondir. (Nicolas Mesnier-Nature) Kalevi Aho (* 1949) forms the heart of this tenth volume of Renate Eggebrecht’s CD series for unaccompanied violin. Here she takes up the cause of supremely expressive music by Finnish composers. Aho, like his compatriots Einojuhani Rautavaara and Pehr Henrik Nordgren, parted ways with that patriarch of Finland’s national music, Jean Sibelius. Yet he too perpetuates the maverick wilfulness of Finnish music, influenced not least by the country’s national epic, the Kalevala. Indeed, the dichotomy between this tradition and his urgent desire to embrace new currents has had a formative impact on his creative output. Aho’s Solo I (Tumultos) dates from 1975. At first, tentative sustained pitches lure us into realms of reflection and reverie in the manner of a prologue. Then the work plunges all the more emphatically into the ‘tempestuous’ and ‘clamorous’. Yet its provocative, far-flung arcs of sound are more suggestive of inward struggles and emotional conflicts than external incidents or plot lines. One year after Aho’s Solo I, Einojuhani Rauta - vaara (1928-2016) composed his Variétude for unaccompanied violin as a compulsory piece for the Sibelius Violin Competition in Helsinki. Here his characteristic plurality of stylistic devices bursts into dazzling turmoil, with lilting transmutations of dance gestures and madcap forays through an imaginary mental wilderness. Whirlpool of emotions Aho’s Sonata for Solo Violin (1973) can be seen as an act of self-assertion by a young musician intent on defining his relation to Western music history by taking his bearings directly on the Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Second Partita (BWV 1004). From this point of departure there arise heterogeneous worlds poised between musicianly intensity, artful abstraction and trenchant musical discourse. The interweaving of past and present is also manifest in the music of Pehr Henrik Nordgren (1944-2008). At times he makes use of old Finnish folk instruments and runic melodies, which he projects onto contemporary forms of expression. His Sonata for Solo Violin, op. 104, completed in January 1999, is based on a traditional dirge which, in his arrangement, congeals from fulfilled silence and gravity into searing expressivity. Besides the use of attack and decay on open strings, it is above all interpolated microtones that recall the techniques and ‘moods’ of folk music. Nordgren calls them ‘intermediate tones that can be interpreted as tonal discolorations, quarter-tone intervals, or as part of a third-tone scale, depending on the context’. The dirge left him profoundly moved, provoking deep thoughts on eternity and worldliness that he translated into a whirlpool of emotions in this sonata. Nordgren died on 25 August 2008. One year later Kalevi Aho composed his musical response: In Memoriam Pehr Henrik Nordgren for unaccompanied violin. Here Aho yields to his emotions while losing himself in ethereal spheres, as if the soul were to ascend into heaven and perform grotesque dances.
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