The Snowshoed Sibelius

[Sergeant Rock]

Yes, I know. The pain of it still haunts me...  So you have 'cracked' No. 6?! Which performance?

The answer appears in message 996 

Sarge

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The answer appears in message 996

Sarge

Stupid of me. Was that my first 'senior moment' at 50, I wonder... I think that Colin Davis was my first Sibelius conductor, too. I remember a box of LPs I borrowed a few times from the library, a long time ago. But 2, 3, 5 and 7 were the symphonies I took to first. No. 4 came courtesy of Karajan. And the Sixth still bores me... I notice I haven't mentioned the First. I like it, but I don't listen to it very often. My FFF (four firm favorites, acronym by me) are 3, 4, 5 and 7...

[Sergeant Rock]

Stupid of me. Was that my first 'senior moment' at 50, I wonder...

The first of many...you have much to look forward to   

I think that Colin Davis was my first Sibelius conductor, too. I remember a box of LPs I borrowed a few times from the library, a long time ago. But 2, 3, 5 and 7 were the symphonies I took to first. No. 4 came courtesy of Karajan. And the Sixth still bores me... I notice I haven't mentioned the First. I like it, but I don't listen to it very often. My FFF (four firm favorites, acronym by me) are 3, 4, 5 and 7...

Well, if the Sixth bores you, Davis has the advantage of getting through it faster than anyone except Maazel/Vienna (faster than anyone in my collection, anyway). At least you won't be bored quite so long 

Davis/Boston                             7:51    4:30   3:45     8:21  (24:27)
Berglund/COE                            7:54    6:09   4:10   10:04
Bernstein/New York                   8:03    5:32   3:54     8:57
Järvi/Gothenburg                       8:05    6:02   3:44     9:15
Maazel/Vienna                           8:24    4:03   3:02     8:42  (24:11)
Davis/LSO (Live)                         8:27    4:50   3:41     8:49
Vänskä/Lahti                              8:28    6:29   3:23     8:19
Davis/LSO (RCA)                         8:36    4:40   3:36     9:03
Inkinen/New Zealand                 8:43    6:19   3:46   10:20
Sanderling/Berlin RSO                9:02    7:02   3:25     9:50
Sarkari/Iceland                           9:10    6:59   3:40   10:33
Maazel/Pittsburgh                      9:20    5:22   3:28      9:11
Barbirolli/Hallé                            9:22    6:55   3:43     9:52
Askenazy/Philharmonia              9:23    5:42   3:54     9:17
Blomstedt/San Francisco            9:24    6:28   3:33   10:23
Segerstam/Helsinki                     9:27    6:08   3:57   10:39     
Berglund/Bournemouth               9:33    6:23   4:04   11:31
Rozhdestvensky/Moscow            9:51    4:46   3:51     9:24

What grabbed my attention when I finally listened to Davis was how he played the final bars exactly as Sibelius asked (no grand slowing down like many conductors) with a return to Tempo I, making the sudden end even more startling, making it sound even stranger than usual (I like MI's use of enigmatic). And then he plays the Allegretto at a swift clip. For me that sounds perfect: there is no real slow movement even though many conductors insist on one (Blomstedt, Sanderling Berglund, Vänskä, etc). Davis integrates the four movements better than anyone, I think.

Sarge

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The first of many...you have much to look forward to   

Happy days are here again... 

Well, if the Sixth bores you, Davis has the advantage of getting through it faster than anyone except Maazel/Vienna (faster than anyone in my collection, anyway). At least you won't be bored quite so long 

(...)
What grabbed my attention when I finally listened to Davis was how he played the final bars exactly as Sibelius asked (no grand slowing down like many conductors) with a return to Tempo I, making the sudden end even more startling, making it sound even stranger than usual (I like MI's use of enigmatic). And then he plays the Allegretto at a swift clip. For me that sounds perfect: there is no real slow movement even though many conductors insist on one (Blomstedt, Sanderling Berglund, Vänskä, etc). Davis integrates the four movements better than anyone, I think.

Very illuminating, Sarge. Thanks!


I know what to do now - get the Davis on vinyl and play it at 45 rpm.  (Just kidding)

[vandermolen]

The Kamu Sibelius CD is very good - a great programme (The Tempest overtures and suites together with The Bard and Tapiola). I loved the 'Berceuse' from The Tempest Suite No 1 - the BIS recording is excellent and I enjoyed all the performances - Tapiola, all the more affecting for being slightly understated.
[asin]B0055ISAFE[/asin]

[Bogey]

Enjoying this No. 2 tonight:

[Bogey]

Just hacking around on the net and it looks like Toscanini only tackled the 2nd and 4th of the cycle, but the 2nd he recorded three times.:

http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~toshome/main/Discographyfrm5.htm

[Brian]

MusicWeb just published one of my favorites of the CD reviews I have written. It's a solo piano arrangement of Symphonies 2 and 5 and I took a few words to discuss why, exactly, I feel the piano arrangements are such failures. In short: because Sibelius is a genius.

Quoted below are a few of the most relevant excerpts.

Without the orchestral forces for which they were written, the Sibelius symphonies fail. That's an awe-inspiring testament to the far-sighted brilliance of the composer's scoring, but it's bad news for this CD....

There's no better example of this than the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. The movement presents a theme, four notes long, in the first bars, then echoes, rearranges, extends, and trims those four notes for a near-endless series of variations. In the first minute alone the theme is traded between French horns, flutes, clarinets, oboes, and back to the clarinets and flutes again. After the massive transition point to the scherzo, the trumpets take the theme, then pass it to the flutes and violins, then to all the winds again, back to the trumpet, over to the horns, then the violins and flutes again. It's the subtle variations which power the drama, and it's the changes in instrumentation which allow the variations to work. The conversation among orchestra members, all speaking the same words in different ways, is what makes this movement both odd and gripping: it's almost like a Beckett experiment, a single sentence spoken a hundred times in a hundred ways.

What we'd expect, then, is that if all of these statements of the motto theme were played on a piano, more or less in the same register most of the time, then the whole movement would fall flat on its face. And indeed this is exactly what happens. On a piano, with all the winds being transcribed to the same stretch of keys, hearing the same motif over and over is achingly boring.

Another example of the orchestral essence of the score is more surprising: the transition to the scherzo makes no musical sense on the piano. Why does it happen then, and not earlier or later? Sibelius, in his original score, uses two tricks here: (a) dramatic crescendo from the bassoon solo to the subsequent turbulence, which signals to us that a major change is about to occur, and (b) long sustained notes in the strings which heighten the tension and "tie" the brass chords together. The sudden uptick in tempo and return of the original theme, blazing forth on trumpets, feels natural rather than forced because it dissolves an incredible amount of tension. On the piano, the buildup is largely absent - the crescendo doesn't have much room to grow since Sigfridsson can't play quietly anyway - and the sense of continuity is disrupted by the piano's inability to sustain those string notes. As a result the moment actually doesn't make sense: it feels like an unnatural lurch backwards, the change in tempo an unconvincing rupture, the new start arbitrary. The formal innovation of this moment is predicated on the capabilities of a symphony orchestra; reduced to piano, the movement is a failure.

The necessity of the orchestra isn't surprising for the daring, original Fifth Symphony, but [pianist-arranger Henri] Sigfridsson also conclusively demonstrates that the more overtly romantic Second is irreconcilably orchestral at its roots. Listen to the opening of the finale: with a full orchestra, we have a tuba scooping out low notes and trumpets on high, creating a massive spatial differentiation: the music feels like a tall building with different sounds coming from different floors. The silence of much of the orchestra also gives us a sense of emptiness or hollowness. All of this is lost on the piano, of course, because both hands are at work, they're not in extremely high and low registers, and therefore the passage doesn't sound at all out of the ordinary.

The booklet notes write that Jean Sibelius conceived of his music in purely orchestral terms, writing for orchestra in his head, rather than composing at the piano in the style of, say, Brahms. The booklet writers, as well as arrangers Sigfridsson and Karl Ekman, appear to believe that Sibelius' bypass around the piano results in vivid, colorful orchestration which is hard for a piano to replicate. What they fail to understand is that Sibelius's writing for orchestra also has structural, rhetorical implications which are hard for a piano to replicate. The sound of the orchestra is not the clothing in which Sibelius dresses his musical ambition: it is a vital organ. It is the heart.

[DavidRoss]

MusicWeb just published one of my favorites of the CD reviews I have written. It's a solo piano arrangement of Symphonies 2 and 5 and I took a few words to discuss why, exactly, I feel the piano arrangements are such failures. In short: because Sibelius is a genius.

Quoted below are a few of the most relevant excerpts.

Right on, Brian.  I particularly like this summation:

Sibelius's writing for orchestra also has structural, rhetorical implications which are hard for a piano to replicate. The sound of the orchestra is not the clothing in which Sibelius dresses his musical ambition: it is a vital organ. It is the heart.

And not only did he write specifically and irreducibly for orchestra "in his head," but after he'd been lionized in Finland he often had the forerunner of the HPO at his disposal to help him fine tune his music and work out the details before sending a piece to the publisher.

[North Star]

The idea to arrange Sibelius's orchestral works for piano is just about as ridiculous as it gets. Even Stravinsky's music is somewhat possible to arrange for solo piano, but Sibelius's genius is so much in the use of the orchestra, and it can't be reproduced with a piano. The Finnish classical music magazine Rondo reviewed the Sigfridsson's album some time ago - and it wasn't pretty.

[Brian]

And not only did he write specifically and irreducibly for orchestra "in his head," but after he'd been lionized in Finland he often had the forerunner of the HPO at his disposal to help him fine tune his music and work out the details before sending a piece to the publisher.

Did not know that!

Another note: BIS' Sibelius edition is complete.

[North Star]

Did not know that!

Another note: BIS' Sibelius edition is complete.

You can get the 13th box from here (although it's cheaper at Amazon, if you can wait a week  )
http://www.naxosdirect.fi/4CD-BOX-Sibelius-Edition-Vol-13---Miscellaneous-Works/title/BIS%201936/


CD 1 - Organ music; liturgic Music (eg. Music for Freemasons, Op 113)
CD 2 - Sketches for piano, organ and orchestra, unfinished works
CD 3 - Alternative versions of organ works and Music for Freemasons
CD 4 - Music by Sibelius's students and contemporaries

I'm not feeling a terrible urge to buy this.

[Brian]

Reviewer Fight! My MusicWeb colleague Dominy Clements has just reviewed the Henri Sigfridsson CD of Symphonies 2 and 5 arranged for piano, and he calls it "a magnificent success"! Looks like the good Sibelius-lovers of the world will have to decide... 

MusicWeb just published one of my favorites of the CD reviews I have written. It's a solo piano arrangement of Symphonies 2 and 5 and I took a few words to discuss why, exactly, I feel the piano arrangements are such failures.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I now have read both reviews. On this side you have the piano's 'honesty' in stripping the music of its spectacle, in the other conclusive proof of Sibelius's orchestral genius in passages that make no pianistic sense at all.


If I'd buy the CD, it would be for its instructive value only.

[MishaK]

Anyone familiar with this?

[Brian]

For those who remember M forever's complaint about the way that conductors misshape the final bars of Sibelius' Seventh, good news: Pietari Inkinen on Naxos gets it absolutely right. I haven't been a fan of his symphony series, but his Seventh's coda is absolutely perfect, and really puts a lot of bigger-name readings - Berglund/EMI, Segerstam, Vanska - to shame. What clarity!

[DieNacht]

Abravanel: much too lightfooted, subdued, classicist and pointless IMO, sold the set.
Some might like it; I find many of Berglund´s famous Sibelius issues I´ve heard too much
like that as well (though certainly not the digital "Kullervo", for instance).

The Rozhdestvensky/melodiya set is now available on 3CD, much more to my taste,
especially 1 & 6. Well-articulated and very impressive, without the more absent-minded routine
in some of his chandos-issues.

[listener]

thread haas been quiet for a while...
but sketches of the 8th symphony have been discovered -
see http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Is+this+the+sound+of+Sibeliuss+lost+Eighth+Symphony/1135269867060

[DavidRoss]

Very interesting...that might wake the thread up a bit!

[Karl Henning]

Doc Emmett Brown sez, "Unbelievable!"