Organ Night & Aria: Songs of the Wanderer

Waltteri Torikka, baritone

Marko Hilpo, piano

The Organ Night & Aria Festival presents a unique concert experience with baritone Waltteri Torikka and pianist Marko Hilpo. The delightful evening opens with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ song cycle Songs of Travel, set to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. The songs lead the listener into the lyrical and pastoral world of the English song tradition and reflect on the wandering life.

One of the highlights of the evening is Olli Mustonen’s Kaleva, based on poems from Eino Leino’s Helkavirsiä. The work will now be heard for the first time in a version for voice and piano. In the texts, the Kalevala metre of the Helkavirsiä poems intertwines with Leino’s modern lyricism, while Mustonen’s musical language brings the mythological, archaic and timeless world of the work vividly to life.

In Ilkka Kuusisto’s four madrigals, set to the refined poems of Lassi Nummi, the Finnish musical language resonates with vitality and wit.

PROGRAMME:

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Songs of Travel (1904)

The Vagabond

Let Beauty Awake

The Roadside Fire

Youth and Love

In Dreams

The Infinite Shining Heavens

Whither Must I Wander?

Bright Is the Ring of Words

I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

The Lake in the Mountains

Olli Mustonen (b. 1967)

Kaleva (2026)

(Eino Leino, from the collection Helkavirsiä)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Hymn Tune Prelude on Song 13 by Gibbons

Ilkka Kuusisto (1933–2022)

Madrigals (1978)

Before Awakening

Below in the Valley the River

You Are Dear to Me

All the Brooks, All the Forest

DURATION:

Approx. 70 minutes, no intermission