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Erik Bergman: The Recent Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Malcolm Hayes
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Extract

Erik Bergman has long been regarded in his native Finland as one of his country's senior composers, but his music has been slow to make its way abroad. Some of the obstacles are understandable: choral music, for instance, constitutes a large slice of Bergman's output, and the fact that many of his texts are in Finnish or Swedish has obviously (if erroneously) been off-putting for foreign choirs. But the real problem is one of perception. Bergman's music has a particular kind of originality and character which, while in one sense typically Scandinavian, simply does not conform to the expectation that has been conditioned by the more exportable aspects of 19th-century nationalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 158 , September 1986 , pp. 15 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 Far from disproving the point, Sibelius's Violin Concerto reinforces it. The work is dominated by its first movement, whose structural power relates to true symphonic thought in a way that the concerto-style gestures of the other two movements do not; the soloist's relationship to the orchestra in each case underlines the difference.

2 Payne's, Anthony Song of the Clouds (1980)Google Scholar for oboe and orchestra is another.

3 Heininen, Paavo, Erik Bergman's path in the new music (p. 147, Erik Bergman: A Seventieth Brithday Tribute, ed. Jeremy Parsons; Edition Pan. Helsinki, 1981)Google Scholar.

4 Pohjola translates as Northland, Tuonela as Death's Domain; I have stayed with the original Finnish names out of unashamed affection for the Sibelian landscape.