Come on. Be honest. How often do you listen to a recording that occasionally makes you smile and has the overall effect of making you feel happy and warm inside–and somewhat awed, and even hopeful for the future? What’s more, the performances are uniformly entertaining and maintain the highest artistic and technical standard throughout. For me, it’s the sound of children’s voices singing that does it, especially when the repertoire is first class and the singing exemplifies the best effort of a well-trained choir.
This recording, compiled from two different sessions in the late 1970s, shows Finland’s Tapiola Children’s Choir to be not only an outstanding children’s ensemble, but one of the world’s outstanding choirs, period. And the repertoire is equally impressive, from Sibelius and Sallinen to Bach, Handel, and Praetorius. Along the way we get to discover, through these technically polished, perfectly tuned, bright-toned voices some relatively unknown works by Finnish composers such as Hannikainen, Kuula, Koskinen, and Pacius. Two Japanese songs that recently have become very popular with children’s choirs in North America–Hotaru koi and Sakura–are given their best-recorded versions here, so full of energy and knowing musical expression. One of the best–and more difficult–selections is an anonymous song whose English translation is “Oh Nightingale, Come!”; another highlight is Sibelius’ Sydämeni laulu (Song of My Heart), a strange but beautiful song about children sleeping, sweetly rocked by Tuonela’s maid in the kingdom of the dead.
Most of the pieces are a cappella and although many of them present intonation challenges that would test the skills of any choir, they apparently stir not the slightest uncertainty among these fearless singers whose performances seem as natural for them as breath. Many listeners will be surprised to find the “big” work on the disc to be a little-known Finnish mystery play–Marjatta, matala neiti (Marjatta, Lowly Maiden)–by Einojuhani Rautavaara. This 22-minute piece for soloists and chorus (with a brief spoken opening and closing by a narrator), was commissioned for this choir, and it’s based on a version of the nativity story from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. This is a charming and quite ambitious work that truly demands skilled soloists and choir. Most of the singing is a cappella, and although the musical style is tonal, it’s harmonically advanced and rhythmically adventurous. Rautavaara creates a sort of otherworldly atmosphere that perfectly evokes the story’s mystery and magic–he also asks for some very worldly sounds when the chorus makes the “baaas” of the sheep to introduce a scene where Marjatta becomes a shepherdess.
The sound is not perfect: you can tell that two different venues, and presumably slightly different personnel, were used because the first 10 tracks are brighter and the choir more distant than the last nine, which includes the closer-up, heftier-sounding Rautavaara work. None of this is problematic; you won’t even care once the singing begins. [10/9/2000]
