GRAMOPHONE Review: Sibelius Symphony No.5 etc. – Christian Tetzlaff, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Collon
This is outstanding. The longest sunrise in music emerges through crisp clean air in Nicholas Collon’s wonderfully lucid account of the Fifth Symphony. Woodwinds are keenly profiled, rhythm and dynamics immediately a priority. Even in stasis there’s an imperative to his reading. It’s a landscape that the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra know well, of course, but it retains its mystery. The searching middle section of the first movement where we are suddenly enveloped in cloud and mist is extraordinarily atmospheric, the solitary bassoon lost in time and space. But then finally comes the majestic sunburst and the subsequent feeling that all nature is dancing. Again the bite and uplift in the rhythm makes the coda super-exhilarating.
The word I’d use to describe the second movement is limpid but with a composer you can never second-guess there is that ground-swelling modulation at the heart of the movement where a deep soulfulness breaks through the objectivity. The finale, of course, has its hushed ‘rustle of Spring’ moment which Collon and his orchestra make breathtaking without that feeling of ‘look how quietly we can play’. There is so much air in the texture becoming saturated only in the coda’s ultimate blaze of brass. The most joyous dissonance made consonant – right down to the unanswered questions of the final chords.
The rest of the disc in part showcases Sibelius’ instrument of choice – the violin – in the eloquent and soulful hands of Christian Tetzslaff. The Two Serenades are so much more complex than their title suggests and Tetzslaff and Collon both have a way of suggesting that neither is quite sure where Sibelius’ inquisitive nature will take them next. The melancholia of the second serenade is rapturously addressed by Tetzslaff. Likewise the first of the Two Serious Melodies for violin or cello where somehow or other the alternative instrument is there in spirit.
The rarity here is the music Sibelius wrote for Strindberg’s symbolistic play Swanwhite. Again it’s the deceptive mix of pictorial charm and whimsy with something deeper and more elusive. There is ‘The Peacock’ strutting its stuff replete with castanets and ‘The Harp’ (self-explanatory) which is so redolent of the middle movement of the Fifth Symphony. But then comes ‘The Prince Alone’, passionate and uncertain, and the culminating ‘Song of Praise’ which is symphonic in its aspiration. Terrific and resourceful playing throughout.
A splendid disc, then, with the Fifth Symphony a real contender in an impossibly crowded field.
