Rautavaara, Einojuhani - Lost Landscapes (Works for violin & orchestra) - Lamsma, Simone

Conductor Robert Trevino's fourth album on Ondine focuses on the late works of composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016). Rautavaara is one of Finland's most famous composers after Sibelius and is known worldwide for his neo-Romantic, even mystical compositions. Together with violinist Simone Lamsman and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, the artists perform the famous composer's last four orchestral works. Two of the works are world premiere recordings. In his later years, Rautavaara received numerous requests from leading violinists around the world to compose works for them. He succeeded in doing so and created several large-scale works featuring the solo violin. Fantasia (2015) for violin and orchestra is a work filled with soft neo-Romantic harmonies and high melodic lines. In 2014, Rautavaara was asked to compose a new violin concerto. This commissioned work was created for violin and orchestra as part of the work Deux Sérénades, which remained unfinished at the time of Rautavaara's death: the second movement was sketched out, but only the beginning was orchestrated. Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), a skilled composer of symphonies and concertos who studied composition under Rautavaara in the early 1970s, completed the orchestration in 2018.