Born in 1928, Einojuhani Rautavaara established a reputation as Finland's leading composer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His music identified a latent strand of the wider public consciousness worldwide, and of all his many works, his Seventh Symphony, "Angel of Light," written in 1994, has perhaps aroused the widest response from audiences and critics alike. Many have commented that the work's beauty and spirituality of expression is a conduit for the cosmic and primal aspects of existence—attributes increasingly marginalized in a secularized and high-tech world.

Rautavaara has, in fact, become a respectable alternative for those who seek spiritual contentment but have found new age music unfulfilling. Other "angel" works of his, such as Angels and Visitations and Angel of Dusk, have also attracted wide attention. Commenting on his success, the composer writes, "it is probably down to the spirit of the times, the Zeitgeist. After all, angels are popular now. I felt self-conscious about putting angels in the titles of my works in the 1970s, when my colleagues were giving their works matter-of-fact titles such as Structures for Strings. Now, I feel self-conscious about the fact that angels have become popular in a banal sense with the New Age phenomenon." Rautavaara is a mystic who considers that his compositions already exist in "another reality." Nevertheless, Rautavaara's creative styles are firmly rooted in modernism and serialist techniques.

The Seventh Symphony is scored for a vast orchestra, though it is most often heard in small groups, so much so that massive tuttis, when reached, have a visionary, apocalyptic intensity. The work begins in a serene and contemplative fashion (tranquilo), but the influence of Sibelius (particularly his Symphony No. 4), one of Rautavaara's heroes, is often discernible throughout the score, though later stages are often suggestive of the equally mystical sound-world of U.S. composer Alan Hovhaness. This evocative and disembodied quality emanates from the unusual textural overlays of Rautavaara's orchestration, and is most palpably felt in the closing sequence, marked Pesante-cantabile. The notion of the angelic presence originated in a series of earlier works, and the composer explains them as "an archetype, one of mankind's oldest traditions and perennial companions."

© Michael Jameson, Rovi