Tauno Marttinen

Tauno Marttinen
(b Helsinki, 27 Sept 1912). Finnish composer. He attended the Viipuri Music College from 1920 to 1937, and also in the 1930s studied the piano at the Helsinki Conservatory and composition with Palmgren privately.

He was director of the Hämeenlinna City Orchestra (1949–58) and of the music college there (1950–75). In 1969 he was awarded the Kalevala Jubilee Prize and in 1972 an honorary professorship. He rejected his early Romantic works, changed his style and started his opus catalogue again from no.1, beginning with his award-winning Kokko, ilman lintu (‘Eagle, Bird of the Air’, 1956) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra. This work shows Marttinen at his most typical: colourful, illustrative scoring, fantasia-like, loose, episodic form, static repetitions and ostinatos. Studies with Wladimir Vogel in Switzerland (1958) heralded a five-year commitment to dodecaphony that yielded the first three symphonies, an expressive Violin Concerto, the strong orchestral variations Linnunrata (‘The Milky Way’) and the opera Päällysviitta (‘The Mantle’).