Ulf Wallin: Rautavaara

The Strad Issue: July 2025

Description: A modern classic is refreshed with clarity of vision

Musicians: Ulf Wallin (violin) Turku Philharmonic Orchestra/Ari Rasilainen

Works: Rautavaara: Violin Concerto; Sérénade pour mon amour; Autumn Gardens

Catalogue number: CPO 555 559-2

There’s no shortage of recordings of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s sole Violin Concerto – for a work written as recently as 1977, it has become something of a modern classic. But Swedish violinist Ulf Wallin brings a distinctive freshness and laser-like clarity to the piece, employing a kind of hard-edged lyricism that feels like an ideal match for the composer’s idiosyncratic mix of fragility and ruggedness.

Wallin offers a long-range vision of accumulating intensity and density to Rautavaara’s slow-moving opening, projecting above the composer’s rich orchestrations with apparent effortlessness. He bristles with manic energy in a slightly deranged second movement, but plays Rautavaara’s strange musical imagery entirely straight. The result is an account that’s strongly felt.

Wallin is perhaps more conventionally lyrical in the hushed, luscious 2016 Sérénade pour mon amour (written for Hilary Hahn, and dedicated to Rautavaara’s wife): sighing phrases drip with emotion, while soaring lines sing movingly. It’s a simpler, more occasional work, and Wallin approaches it with eloquence and winning restraint.

The Turku Philharmonic and conductor Ari Rasilainen bring a gentle luminosity to Rautavaara’s dusky harmonies here, and provide enormous power and character in the concerto. They come into their own, however, in the majestic melancholy of the 1999 Autumn Gardens, with a wonderful sense of expansiveness across the work’s three interconnected movements. A disc of gentle revelations, captured in rich, close recorded sound.

DAVID KETTLE