Sibelius, Rautavaara and Lindberg give the piano different kinds of work. Their proximity offers a more exact encounter than the idea of one shared northern atmosphere.

A national label can help a programme bring unfamiliar music into view. It becomes less helpful when it seems to explain the sound before any note has been heard. Finnish piano music contains many approaches to scale, touch, rhythm and the organisation of resonance.

Idyll places Sibelius beside Rautavaara and Lindberg. The historical distance between them matters, as do the different forms they choose. A short character piece and an étude can concentrate attention in different ways, even when both make extensive demands on the instrument’s colour.

Rautavaara’s Six Études, Op. 42, provide a particularly clear example. Each is associated with an interval: thirds, sevenths, tritones, fourths, seconds and fifths. The interval becomes a compositional condition. It affects the spacing of the hands, the density of a chord and the kind of relationship that can develop between successive sounds.

The principle is economical, but its consequences need not be small. A repeated interval can become a source of resonance across the keyboard. The pianist’s task is to preserve its identity while giving a larger passage direction. A study of technique becomes a study of how a sonority can behave.

Lindberg’s two études ask for another encounter with movement and concentration. Heard alongside the Rautavaara cycle, they encourage attention to the way a pianist connects rapid events into a larger continuity. The question is compositional as well as athletic: what allows a succession of notes to acquire a recognisable course?

Sibelius offers a different scale of attention again. His shorter piano pieces can be approached through the balance of a melodic line and its supporting texture. Their titles and associations deserve consideration, but a landscape is an interpretation to be earned through the music, rather than an explanation supplied in advance.

Tähe-Lee Liiv’s programme makes room for these differences. Its most useful common ground is the instrument itself, heard through three distinct compositional imaginations. A shared keyboard becomes a means of recognising how much can change.

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