Sibelius reviews

The word ‘sacred’ can also mean ‘set apart’, which may explain the strange fate of Sibelius’s Tapiola. Routinely it’s listed among the composer’s supreme achievements, yet it’s hardly ever heard in concert. When it appears on record it’s usually as a coupling, and even then conductors seem disinclined to take any risks with it. It’s marvellous then to find a conductor taking a genuinely fresh approach. Hannu Lintu’s Tapiola isn’t the grey, remote expanse so many make of it.

The launch of Britain’s first black and minority ethnic orchestra at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in September 2015 was an inspiring and exciting event. This recording samples a subsequent concert held a year later at the Royal Festival Hall, featuring two popular classics from the standard repertory. While these pieces are always good to hear, one hopes that further recordings by the orchestra might feature works by BME composers that need championing.

For all its darkly tragic story, excitement has always been Kullervo’s keynote: the excitement of a young composer flexing his orchestral muscles; the excitement of its early audience, discovering that their beleaguered little nation had a brilliant new artistic voice; the excitement we felt in the 1970s as it resurfaced in Paavo Berglund’s recording, still among the best. Occasionally raw, yet unmistakeably, blazingly Sibelian, Kullervo foreshadows both his symphonic potential and a dramatic capability he hardly developed.

Thomas Søndergård’s first disc with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, featuring Sibelius’s Symphonies Nos 2 and 7, attracted some solid praise. This new release features some very clean-cut, finely detailed playing, reflected in a vividly immediate recording. With repeated listening, though, Søndergård’s reading of the First Symphony sounds less impressive.

Sibelius springboarded the late Einojuhani Rautavaara’s career by recommending him for a scholarship to New York’s Juilliard School. His reverence for the older composer shows in this song cycle In the Stream of Life he orchestrated for his friend Gerald Finley. Singers such as Soile Isokoski and Jorma Hynninen have shown how effective such orchestrations can be, whether Sibelius’s own or those by Jussi Jalas and others. Rautavaara’s, though, are different, reflections on Sibelius’s own style rather than mere pastiche.

For many years, Lisa Batiashvili has steadfastly resisted incorporating the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto into her repertory, believing that there were too many different views of the work in her head. Fortunately, thanks to the encouragement of Daniel Barenboim she changed her mind and was persuaded to look afresh at the music.

The Ehnes Quartet favour rhythmic buoyancy, athletic grace and crisp, clear lines for Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet. Speeds are lithe, but not especially fast, and while it may be clean it’s not hygienic – there’s plenty of colour and variety of attack. Perhaps occasionally one may miss the special alchemy that can bloom in the Andante, where the lied’s hypnotic repetitions steal into melancholy dream.

This is a useful disc of warhorses, played with all the stops
out, but luscious as well as fierce in
the conductor’s best period. Wonderful Tchaikovsky and Sibelius in particular.

Michael Tanner