© Marek Sabogal

Waltteri Torikka, baritone
Marko Hilpo, piano

Organ Night and Aria Festival presents a unique concert experience as baritone Waltteri Torikka and pianist Marko Hilpo perform a rare and compelling programme. The evening’s special highlight is Olli Mustonen’s work Kaleva, based on poems from Eino Leino’s Helkavirsiä cycle, heard for the first time in a version for voice and piano.

Helkavirsiä, published between 1903 and 1916, is a celebrated series of poems by Eino Leino in which Kalevala-metre poetry intertwines with Leino’s modern lyric voice. Mustonen’s musical language vividly evokes the mythological, archaic and timeless world of the poems.The concert also features Ilkka Kuusisto’s Four Madrigals, where the Finnish musical idiom sounds lively and imaginative.

The evening opens with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s song cycle Songs of Travel, set to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, where the lyrical and pastoral tone of the English song tradition merges with a reflective portrait of a wanderer’s life.

The result is an atmospheric programme in which Finnish poetry and music meet the international art song tradition, interpreted by two outstanding musicians.

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

TICKETS:
Tickets: €15–35 + service fees (from €1.50 + 0.65% per order via www.lippu.fi)
www.lippu.fi