Thursday, August 04, 2016

Einojuhani Rautavaara

The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara died on July 27, 2016. I should have posted something at the time....but I don't know much of his music. I have a smattering of choral music and I've seen the DVD of Rasputin, which is an excellent opera; some enterprising US opera company should pick it up. He wrote 9 operas, in fact; I bet there's more than one worth staging.

Here's Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim's obituary, which has an excellent correction:
Correction: August 4, 2016 
An earlier version of this obituary, using information from Mr. Rautavaara’s music publisher, erroneously included one composer among those who studied with him. Kaija Saariaho was never Mr. Rautavaara’s student.

1 comment:

Henry Holland said...

I highly recommend his opera Thomas, there's an excellent recording of it with Jorma Hynninen. I like Vincent (as in Van Gogh) too, not so hot on Aleksis Kivi, a little too neo-classical for me.