Rautavaara: The House of the Sun.(Sound Recording Review)

[] Kaappola, Regnell, Huhta, Juntunen, Raiskio; Romu, Katajala, Hakala, Nieminen, Backstrom; Oulu Symphony Franck. Text and translation. Ondine 1032 (2)

Early in 1987, Einojuhani Rautavaara read in the newspaper that two elderly spinsters had been found dead of the cold in their rundown house in Littoinen, southwestern Finland. During the Russian Revolution, their family--English father, German mother--had escaped St. Petersburg for Finland. New surroundings and a strange language were too much for them. Father, brother and older sister ended up suicides. After the mother's death, the twin girls were left alone to live out their lives in a time warp.

For Rautavaara, the story had a whimsical aspect. Three years later, he finished an opera about it, which he called a tragedia buffa. "The dramatic, macabre events were not what primarily appealed to me," he writes, "but rather the attitude to time and reality of those two old maids."

This composer is something of a sorcerer, actually creating a time warp in sound. After a prelude of lovely garden music, just right for the sisters' dream world, they slide in and out of reverie, in which flashbacks and present imaginings are enacted by ghostlike figures from the ...