Einojuhani Rautavaara is Finland’s best-known composer since Sibelius – a ‘giant of beauty’, in the words of one critic. His five-movement suite The Fiddlers borrows and reinterprets tunes from the musical notebook of a country fiddler 300 years ago, evoking players and scenes from the Finnish countryside: first a grand procession of village fiddlers, then a single musician playing alone in the forest on a midsummer evening. A village organist improvises on memories of Bach and wedding tunes; a devil gives us wild and sinister polka; and the suite finishes with a stamping, jumping dance where, as Rautavaara puts it, the dancers’ ‘broad faces are as solemn as in the church, but a strange excitement lurks in their huge legs and hands.’

Wojciech Kilar is perhaps most familiar to Western audiences for his film scores – The Truman Show, Portrait of a Lady and The Pianist, among many others – but he is also one of Poland’s leading composers of orchestral concert music. Orawa is named for the region in the southern Tatra highlands that is home to the traditional Góral fiddlers.

Kilar’s music here blends folk elements with minimalism, starting from a simple repeating pattern, bouncing off its own rhythms, and building to electrifying peaks of sheer string power, with notes flashing past almost faster than the ear can catch. The Guardian’s review of the ACO’s UK performance of Orawa called it ‘a miracle of precise ensemble’ that ‘provided reminders of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s innate brilliance and verve.’

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