Einojuhani Rautavaara

Einojuhani Rautavaara was the best-known composer in contemporary Finnish music. He began to study at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in the late 1940s, but his professional career didn't begin until 1954 when his orchestral A Requiem in Our Time won a competition sponsored by Thor Johnson, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. That same year, Rautavaara entered an advanced course in music composition with Aarre Merikanto and attracted the attention of Sibelius himself, who in 1955 recommended that Rautavaara be awarded a Tanglewood scholarship to study at the ...