Pleasure and persuasion
Jean Sibelius: Symphonies 1-7 (Ondine)
★★★★★
The seventh is the least explicable of the Sibelius symphonies and the one I turn to first when assessing a new cycle. Written in 1924, when Finland had won independence from Russia and overcome a bloody civil war that mirrored the whites-vs-reds battles across the border, the symphony has one movement and lasts less than twenty minutes. Sibelius, turning sixty, is either giving up or running out of solutions.
All his life he had led from the front in defining the nation by the force of his music. Now, disillusioned and rejected by half the nation, he gives away few clues to his thoughts and direction. The symphony opens with an ascendant scale and falls back on familiar clips from its predecessors. Few conductors come close to getting it right.
The reason I have opened with it in this Helsinki Philharmonic cycle is because the conductor, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, is the first I ever heard make sense of this frustrating enigma. The performance was a late-night German broadcast and it eclipsed, in clarity and challenge, every celebrated Sibelian I had ever heard — Kajanus and Karajan, Beecham and Barbirolli, Colin and Andrew Davis, Bernstein, Maazel, Rattle, Berglund and more. Of all these eminences, Saraste just gets it. And in this recording, he gets it even more than before. I have never loved the seventh symphony as much as I do now.
Saraste, 70 this year, has enjoyed a lower-key career than his Pekka-alike friend, Salonen, working as music director in Toronto, Oslo, Cologne and back home. The Helsinki Philharmonic, never a swagger orchestra, responds intuitively to his beat in music they know like reindeer’s milk. Many vanities apart from Decca’s Oslo set with the callow Klaus Mäkelä, this is the most satisfying Sibelius compilation I can recall for a very long while.
The seventh symphony aside, the sixth comes over as a thoughtful reflection on national turmoil, the third is pleasurably pastoral and the second and fifth are so persuasive you wonder how they could ever be done more idiomatically. If it’s the real Sibelius you’re after, the address is saraste@Helsinki.
