This stunningly dramatic work is one of the finest neo-Romantic chorus and orchestra compositions. Its origins lie in the childhood of composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), one of Finland's leading composers.

Growing up, he read many of the books in his father's library. He found there a story called, in Finnish, Valtameren salaiussus, a title that translates into English as "The Secret of the Deep," by Edgar Allen Poe. Although the sleeve note to the Finnish edition described the story in terms that led one to expect a typical boys' adventure saga (two sailing vessels in a strange and wonderful dark sea), what stayed in Rautavaara's mind, throughout his life, was the increasing strangeness of the tale, including a baroque description of the final moments of the seafarers.

Sixty years later, Rautavaara found a set of the Collected Works of Poe in the original English, which he could now read, and immediately looked for "The Secret of the Deep." He was stymied for awhile, until he located it under Poe's surprisingly prosaic original title, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Then nearly 70 years old, Rautavaara realized that the strange mood of the story's end was just what he needed for a composition expressing his approach to the time when he would be "on the last frontier," defined as "the edge of an as yet unexplored area."

He discovered, in excerpting the final paragraphs of The Narrative, that its full dimension is lost when divorced from the whole story. He felt it his task, therefore, to treat Poe's words in the chorus as the frame of a longer narrative, which is told by the orchestra "in a way that is beyond the scope of words."

The orchestral writing is, therefore, highly virtuosic, creating a surging and passionate narrative. Liquid sounds abound in this tale of the sea. There are running and surging figurations in strings and winds, cymbal rolls suggesting splashing sounds, and heaving brass chords. This provides a background, constantly in motion, to the rich neo-Impressionist harmonies, tonal yet highly chromatic. There are wind-sounds, also, and an overall eeriness that appears early, as when a lovely and flowing string melody is thickened with woodwind "shadow parts", a half-step off from an octave doubling.

The work shows a master's touch in the way that it grows and recedes in power, but always gains the momentum of increasing musical tension, until its final resolution. It is a wild and beautiful work, reminiscent of the surging passions of the early music of Sir Arnold Bax and the late music of Alexander Scriabin (without the "mystic chord").

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide