Leevi Madetoja - Piano Trio, Op. 1 (1910)

Violin: Olavi Pälli
Cello: Veli-Pekka Bister
Piano: Ralf Gothóni

00:00 I. Allegro energico
10:39 II. Andante, non troppo sostenuto
20:31 III. Allegro vivace

Leevi Madetoja (17.2.1887-6.10.1947) was by nature basically a National Romantic composer. Equally pronounced in his music was, however, a classical streak aiming at balance, clarity, refinement of expression and technical polish. He also drew on a combination of the Finnish folk melody and the new French music he heard in Paris at the beginning of the century to produce a style that was entirely his own.

Madetoja had absorbed the Finnish sound into his very soul as a little boy already, while listening to the religious melodies of his native Ostrobothnia in western Finland. But while he was still at school he also drew inspiration from the Finnish art music then in the process of emerging. As a young student Madetoja also got to know the folk melodies of Northern Ostrobothnia while on a collection tour made in summer 1909. He later enriched the melodies collected by his composer colleague Toivo Kuula and ingeniously integrated them with art music in his opera The Ostrobothnians.

No less significant than this national element in his art were, however, the international stimuli provided particularly by French music at the beginning of the century but also by Richard Strauss and Carl Nielsen. At the suggestion of his friend Toivo Kuula, Madetoja chose as the destination for his first study tour in 1910-11 the city of Paris, where the music of Debussy and Dukas had for Kuula provided something in the nature of an awakening. Madetoja was, however, attracted by the more classical style of the Schola cantorum, founded on César Franck and the French symphonic tradition, headed by Vincent d’Indy. Madetoja’s plans for studying with d’Indy were reduced to one formal meeting, but the musical and cultural impressions of Paris were all the more important. Madetoja was to return to France several times in his lifetime, to work and to seek new inspiration.

Madetoja came from a humble background. His father, a ship’s mate, died in the United States without ever seeing his son, and Leevi and his brother were left to be brought up by their mother. As time went by, he began to be drawn more and more to music and became an excellent kantele player. Madetoja must surely be the only major composer in the history of world music who played the kantele, Finland’s national instrument, as his main instrument. He also studied the violin and piano on his own. In 1906 he set off to study in Helsinki, where he enrolled both at the Music Institute and the University and graduated from both four years later.

Madetoja was not a wonderchild, but he did have a natural talent and learnt to compose not from his teachers Armas Järnefelt, Erik Furuhjelm and Jean Sibelius but simply by composing, thus managing to acquire the means of writing both choral and orchestral music without any apparent effort. Even his very first publicly performed compositions, the solo songs Yksin and Lähdettyäs of 1908, have won themselves a permanent place in the repertoire. He was, furthermore, obliged to write his first large-scale work, the Piano Trio op. 1, on his own because his teacher, Sibelius, was abroad for the whole of spring 1909.

https://fennicagehrman.fi/composer/ma...

Artworks: Moebius