Perttu HAAPANEN (b. 1972)
Compulsion Island (2014) [15:49}
Ladies’ Room (2006-7, rev 2008) [19:22]
Flute Concerto (2018) [27:07]
Helena Juntunen (soprano)
Yuki Koyama (flute)
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Hannu Lintu, Dima Slobodeniouk
rec. 2016-18, Helsinki Music Centre, Finland
Texts and translations for included
ONDINE ODE1307-2 [62:41]
Back in August I enjoyed reading Marc Rochester’s deliciously tart review of ‘Reports’, a BIS CD devoted to the uncompromising choral music of the youngish Finn Perttu Haapanen. Needless to say I streamed the disc immediately, and while one doffs one’s cap to the composer’s fertile imagination for vocal possibility and the impressive discipline of the Helsinki singers, I utterly concur with my colleague’s sentiments although I would have struggled to match the elegance and tact of his prose. To be fair, the opportunity to hear any one of those works in the context of a mixed recital may well have provoked a more positive response, but the novelty swiftly wears off over the course an hour of radical vocal effects, in pieces which only infrequently hint at Haapanen’s potential for sonic beauty.
I have been familiar with his cycle Ladies’ Room for a number of years (after hearing and rather liking an off-air recording of the sequence, possibly the original version, about a decade ago) so I was not completely surprised by the (extreme) experimentation involved on the BIS disc. But it is relentless and leaves the initially unsympathetic listener little if any wriggle room. Notwithstanding the presence of the revised version of Ladies’ Room on this superbly realised Ondine disc, the focus for the second high profile Haapanen release of 2019 shifts squarely towards his orchestral music. A sense of adventure and elements of confrontation are still apparent in each of these works but relatively speaking these features are deployed more discreetly. All three have much to commend them.
Ladies’ Room is a sequence of nine vocal pieces (the note refers to it as a ‘song cycle’ but I am reluctant to use this nomenclature; I suppose much depends on how one defines the word ‘song’). Either way it was originally completed in 2007 and first performed by the soprano Helena Juntunen whose account here radiates both affection and confidence. Haapanen fearlessly incorporates many of the vocal strategies encountered in the works on the BIS disc into the solo writing here. His composition technique could conceivably be seen as a primer for producing the optimum variety of different sounds from the human voice and matching these with texts which are treated no less unconventionally, often being reduced to a basic phonemic or syllabic level. What emerges is almost a stream of consciousness which will not unduly terrify anyone with a passing knowledge of the pieces Berio produced for Cathy Berberian, or maybe of Ligeti’s Aventures diptych. In fact Ladies’ Room encompasses a concise and satisfying exegesis of psychological disintegration. The five odd-numbered texts are diffuse but identifiable, and include an ancient invoice found in a Scotland Yard archive relating to expenses incurred in burning a woman at the stake, two poems by Finnish polymath choral conductor and singer Jutta Seppinen and a Paul Celan poem which acts as a kind of rapt epilogue (and projects a singular beauty). The even numbered texts are collage-like aphorisms invoking the damaged spirit of the Swiss Art Brut pioneer Adolf Wölfli. If these texts combine to invoke notions of paranoia or auditory hallucinations, of sorcery or witchcraft, the text at the heart of Ladies Room is The Phoenix Force, a strange compilation of Haapanen’s own creation which blends the results of internet searches, quotes from the Bible and other sources and plays out like a mash-up of Master-of-Ceremonies type introductions to shows like Cabaret, or Lulu or even Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy. To my ears The Phoenix Force particularly evokes a rather forgotten masterpiece of the early 1990s, Benedict Mason’s remarkable Self-Referential Songs and Realistic Virelais It’s captivatingly performed by Helena Juntunen, who makes the amalgam of heavy-breathed blowing sounds, silly infantile babble, insistent syllabic mutterings, onomatopoeia, alliteration and even bel canto seem perfectly natural and even beautiful. Haapanen’s writing for chamber orchestra is equally detailed and vibrant; Ladies’ Room is aptly dizzying, discomfiting and disorientating.
Even better in my view are the two recent orchestral couplings, played with real pzazz by Lintu’s magnificent Finnish band. Compulsion Island (2014) is a bristling tone poem, its ambiguous title itself influenced by the attraction of opposites often found in the world of Japanese anime. According to Kimmo Korhonen’s detailed and revealing booklet note, Compulsion Island was particularly inspired by certain stylistic devices used by the director Satishi Koni in his movie Millenium Actress. Haapanen is quoted thus: “in this stylised film…..tranquility combines with time layers in which the main character, through continuous editing, is at once running from something and running after something, often out of breath”. I think this description uncannily captures the flavour of this music. Compulsion Island is a virtuosic orchestral essay crammed with colourful percussion and jagged trumpet fanfares, with whooping clarinets and shrill winds and strings. Its material speeds up unexpectedly and slows down in instalments, cinematically and deliberately. The listener can perceive the collective inhalation and exhalation of the players in its sound, it (w)rings out, resonates and pauses. Half-melodies stop and start, occur and re-occur in the strings. There’s some delightful interplay between clarinet and solo violin, and even a quirky tuba solo. It’s exciting and elusive. It also strikes me as being unambiguously Finnish.
Still more impressive is Haapanen’s big new Flute Concerto which is barely a year old. It’s given a riveting reading by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s principal flute Yuki Koyama, with the band this time under the direction of Dima Slobodeniouk. Not unexpectedly the solo content features a plethora of extended techniques, while the orchestra includes some decidedly unusual interlopers. One of these is a harpsichord whose rather sour chords open a first movement whose stop/start undercurrent is emboldened by the presence of a typewriter, whingeing string textures, and a briefly virtuosic flute solo which evaporates into mouthpiece ticking and spitting. This kind of creates the sonic impression of ‘composer’s block’, which is resolved at around the 3:00 mark when the work settles into something more measured, with the jaunty neo-baroquisms of the strings and solo flute. Happanen’s architecture bends and twists to accommodate passages which alternate seemingly purposeful, confident material with more tentative, mercurial content. The music is often brittle but consistently attractive, hinting at sumptuous melody which never quite materialises but instead frequently collapses in on itself. There’s a good deal of humour in this rather literal music. It’s as though the composer can’t quite decide whether he’s Sallinen or Saariaho so sensibly chooses to be Haapanen instead. As a consequence this Flute Concerto seems really fresh and original. The second movement is marked Quasi cadenza, poco rubato, with the soloist providing something of a bridge between the two panels before the music becomes almost three dimensional, with layered Xenakis-like polyrhythms and toyshop allusions arranged neatly atop one another. The solo flute adopts a distorted, microtonal song at one point, its melody considered and commented upon by the other instruments; this material is oddly disfigured and surreal. The music works by virtue of seeming not quite right, and eventually it slows down noticeably; the strings are suddenly heard as if from another, equally real world that seems to be getting further away. The conclusion is even more elusive. The Flute Concerto is odd; thought provoking and indubitably alluring. It is difficult indeed to imagine more accomplished contributions from either soloist or orchestra. Ondine’s sound leaves no detail to the imagination.
So in the final analysis I’m pleased to report that contrary to the abiding impression left by that rather frustrating BIS disc from a few months back, all three pieces here seem to confirm that Perttu Haapanen is a major player in the firmament of new Finnish music, and one hopes that this fine new Ondine issue will win him an army of new admirers. I certainly look forward to hearing more.
Richard Hanlon
