In late spring 1899 the composer Ernst Mielck was struck with a serious bout of tuberculosis of the jugular gland. He underwent an operation, but the doctors did not give him much hope of recovery. By July of that year Mielck’s condition showed signs of improvement, and in the middle of August he moved to the shores of Lago di Maggiore in Locarno, Switzerland, where he was to spend the following winter. Yet in spite of the encouraging prognosis, his condition took a turn for the worse: the illness spread to his lungs and Mielck died on 22 October. He was buried in Locarno two days later – on what would have been his 22nd birthday.

Mielck’s sudden death marked the premature end of a career that promised great things. He had come to prominence only a few years earlier, first as a pianist, then as a composer. In his few years of creativity he composed a body of works that, though small, nonetheless demonstrated his extraordinary talent. His output includes the first fully fledged Finnish symphony (1897), composed two years before the First Symphony of Jean Sibelius. Contemporary musical circles even viewed him as a significant challenger to Sibelius. Mielck’s career reached its zenith in December 1898, when he became the first Finnish composer to hold a concert of his own works with the Berlin Philharmonic.

In spite of this success, Mielck has remained something of an outsider in the history of Finnish music. At a time when young Finnish composers were increasingly turning their attentions to national themes and a post-Wagnerian musical language, Mielck took inspiration from central-European Romanticism and the traditional compositional forms of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.

The rapid evolution in Mielck's language in the three years covered by this CD is remarkable. The two overtures and cantatas make clear that he was already a gifted composer in the post-Schumann Romantic tradition, and the Finnish Suite, written in the last year of his life, shows a striking simplification of his textures and what seems to have been a nascent nationalism.