Sateen aikaan (Rain Time)

Kalevi Aho's Sateen aikaan (Rain Time), five songs for mezzo-soprano and string quartet (2017) is set to poems of a Finnish modernist Tuomas Anhava (1927-2001). The mood is melancholic, and the poems also address the idea of leaving in a more general sense. It seems to affect the whole of the world the human race is destroying in its madness, as expressed in the second and third poems. In the last poem, Coda, the perspective broadens out to become conciliatory, universal and cosmic.