Over the next decades he was a guest conductor at opera houses in both Europe and the U.S., including the Deutsche Oper Berlin, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House. He was principal conductor of a number of European orchestras, including the Danish National Radio Symphony and, from 1995 to 2007, the Helsinki Philharmonic.
After a period of relatively conventional modernism in the 1960s when he composed four string quartets, among other works, he entered into more radical, jokey, games-playing experiments in the 1970s. His sixth quartet of 1974, which he wrote should be played “in the spirit of Gustav Mahler,” was played with “a ghostly figure made of chicken wire and papier-mâché who sat at a piano, silently,” the critic Lynn René Bayley recalled in 2016.
Mr. Garvey noted that his client’s orchestral compositions were not so much symphonies as recollections of the 18th-century concerto grosso, featuring as they often did concertante-style dueling pianos. Mr. Segerstam also made numerous well-received recordings of the 19th-century symphonic repertoire, including Brahms, Mahler, and Bruckner, and of modernist operas like Berg’s “Wozzeck.”
He was, Mr. Lintu suggested, deliberately provocative and enigmatic and “enjoyed baffling people around him.” “You have to motivate the sound,” Mr. Segerstam said in one interview. “Music is not that which sounds. Music is why that which sounds, sounds like it sounds, when it sounds.”
In addition to his son Jan, from his first marriage, to the violinist Hannele Angervo-Segerstam (who died this year), Mr. Segerstam is survived by his daughter Pia, also from that marriage; two daughters and a son, Violaelina, Iirisilona and Selimoskar Segerstam, from his marriage to the harpist Minnaleena Jankko, which ended in divorce; his third wife, Eija; and six grandchildren.
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Publish date : 2024-10-16 14:32:00
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