Neglected composers (#2)

 Eduard Tubin (1905-1982)

I'm often surprised by the regularity of which people casually engaged in conversation about music have come across Tubin, and the mutual delight which issues forth when his name is uttered.  'Tubin is funktastic!' was the reply to my advocacy of his music on a certain Facebook group, named (perhaps with a hint of tongue-in-cheek) 'Pretentious Classical Music Elitists'. By pure chance, I came across his Third Symphony on a free magazine CD from about ten years ago and was hooked.  This was brilliant music, clever, assured, colourful melodic and contrapuntal.  The rest of his orchestral output similarly avoided disappointment.

Tubin falls into the third of my categories regarding neglected composers; the 'wrong place at wrong time' reason.  (I realise that at no point have I actually set out the various reasons for neglect, so you will just have to accept that this is Reason number Three).  Having learned the piano (which his father bought for the price of one cow), flute and violin as a child, Tubin was creating quite a promising career for himself in independent Estonia between the wars, doing a bit of folk-song-collecting (a career must for any non-serialist composer in the early twentieth century) and writing appealing early symphonies and chamber music for his less-than-a-million fellow countrymen.  (Just think about that number for a moment - equivalent to your national audience being the same as the population of Merseyside).  The first few symphonies sound a little like a mixture of Sibelius, Nielsen, Vaughan Williams and Glazunov with just a hint of Ravel, although they're actually a lot better than that.  The Second 'Legendare' opens with the strikingly original sound of heavily divided strings, and with further sections making imaginative use of timpani and piano shows what a superb orchestrator Tubin was.  The patriotic Third Symphony ('Heroic') is a tour de force for the brass and contains some terrific counterpoint, as well as an unexpected and beautiful violin solo in the hybrid scherzo-cantalina of the second movement. The Fourth ('Lyrical') 'is probably his first real masterpiece, combining a deft sense of pacing with wonderfully expressive lyricism and masterful orchestration.  The slow movement is one of the most gorgeous nocturnes in the symphonic repertoire.  And it's a cut above mere cow-pat pastoralism, too.

Other works from this period are similarly attractive, if a little more slight.  The First Violin Concerto is a pleasingly pastoral work, whilst it's difficult to understand why the Estonian Dance Suite is more popular, or at least included on ABRSM exam syllabuses from time to time, for its melodic virtues are many.  Both the violin and piano and violin and orchestra versions are easily as good as the Holberg Suite or Britten's Simple Symphony, and in several places provides inventive harmonic twists that many more notable composers wouldn't have thought of.

Sadly it all went to pot in 1944 with the German, then Soviet invasions of Estonia. Tubin fled to Sweden not long after the première of the Fourth Symphony (although not before the Luftwaffe had bombed the theatre in Tallinn in which score was kept in a safe.  The safe was pulled from the rubble the next morning with the score - singed but intact - still inside it.  Many pages were fragile and Tubin had to copy out a new score of the entire symphony to conduct from in future).  In Sweden he was an unknown and worked several menial jobs before he was eventually allowed to join the Royal Society of Musicians and earn royalties and teach.  He returned to Estonia infrequently, and from the Sixth Symphony onwards his music is considerably darker and more dissonant, although still essentially lyrical and melodic - think Berg, Henze, late Britten or Shostakovich.  His masterpiece of this period is the Eighth Symphony (1966), which although a four-movement sonata is still an extraordinarily powerful and pertinent modernist work.  Tubin heard a recording of the symphony not long before he died and noted how 'the final dissonant chorale rises up and disappears into the distance'. It is not hard to imagine the composer staring out into the bleakness of the Baltic Sea trying and failing to glimpse his homeland across the waves. Indeed, several quiet endings in my own works have been inspired by the closing bars of this symphony (as well as the very loud tam-tam crash that precedes it!).

To me, Tubin always sounds like he's aware of his obscurity and is trying extra hard to give his music lasting value.  And, as is so often the case, upheaval actually enhanced his creative powers and forged a great advancement in his style.  Tubin would certainly have been a lesser figure had he not had to move to Sweden and adopt a grittier musical language.  If nothing else, how many other composers (apart from Hindemith) wrote a double bass concerto?  And how many have written a concerto for balalaika?

Essential listening: Symphonies 3,4 and 8; Violin concerto No.1; Estonian Dance Suite; Toccata
Also interesting: Symphonies 2, 5, 6 and 9; Piano Sonata No.2 'Northern Lights'; String Quartet; Double Bass concerto; Music for Strings; Kratt (ballet)

As if often the case, the brilliant Swedish label Bis have covered much of his output, including all the symphonies and concerti, pretty much all the chamber music and some other good bits. Even better, there are now two competing Tubin symphony cycles, so you can choose either Neeme Jarvi on Bis or Arvo Volmer on Alba (I would reccomend the Swedish Radio SO and Bergen SO on the former over the Volmer's Estonian National SO, but the Alba sound quality is generally better).  A great amount of the aforementioned recordings are also on Spotify.