Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)
Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82 (1915/16/19)
Two Serenades, Op. 69 (1913)
Two Serious Melodies, Op. 77 (1915)
Suite from Swanwhite (Svanevit), Op. 54 (1908)
Christian Tetzlaff (violin)
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Collon
rec. live, September 2022 (Op. 69), September 2024 (Op. 77), April 2024 (Opp. 54 & 82, Op. 54); Helsinki Music Centre, Finland
Reviewed as a download
Ondine ODE14682 [76]

Here is a fun fantasy game for you. Don’t take too long over it. Commission a contemporaneous composer to write the music for a production of a Strindberg play. Top of my list would be Mahler for The Dance of Death, with Zemlinsky and Miss Julie a close second. I expect most MusicWeb readers would come up with much more imaginative choices (although unfortunately I am unable to award any points for those of you citing Webern’s setting of Schien mir’s, als ich sah die Sonne from Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata), but I can tell you that the name of Jean Sibelius would never have occurred to me in such an exercise were it not for the fact that Sibelius did in fact write the incidental music for a Strindberg play. Partly this can be explained by the fact that the play in question, Swanwhite (Svanevit in Swedish) is not a typical Strindberg psychodrama in the mode of those I’ve listed above. As the booklet notes for this CD put it, Swanwhite is ‘the Scandinavian response to French Symbolism provided by the ageing Strindberg’. If that is not enough to put you off, allow me to assure you that the actual play is even worse than other symbolist texts you may be aware of such Maeterlinck’s ponderous Pelléas et Mélisande and Balázs’s turbid Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

The excellent ‘Sibelius One’ website has an article on the music including a detailed synopsis of the play and, if you are really keen, Project Gutenberg offers a 1921 translation of the play by Edwin Björkman. It’s difficult to tell from this if both play and translation are terrible or if Björkman is just doing his best with the hand he’s been dealt. Anyway, in a nutshell, Swanwhite is the daughter of a Duke, living in a castle with him and her evil stepmother. Her deceased mother has been reincarnated as a swan (honestly) and flies in at key moments of the drama. Swanwhite falls in love with a Prince. He falls in love with her. A magical harp and horn help Swanwhite restore the Prince to life after he is believed drowned after deciding to jump off the ship he is on, as you do, and swim back to Swanwhite.

Now, Debussy and Bartók rescued the unpromising dramatic material they were given with brilliant music, as we know. Sibelius had a much more difficult job in that he wasn’t taking overall control as he would have been if he were composing an opera. He had a good track record though. His incidental music for a performance of (the play) Pelléas et Mélisande, was a key part in its well received premiere at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki in 1905. Harriet Bosse, Strindberg’s ex-wife, had played Mélisande and had been deeply impressed by what Sibelius had composed. She suggested to Strindberg that Sibelius be commissioned to write the music when a production of Swanwhite at the same venue was planned in 1908 and Sibelius agreed. That production was successful and again the music was singled out as a key factor in the critical response. Strindberg himself never heard the music however. When the play was premiered in his native Stockholm later that same year there was no music performed for budgetary reasons.

As you will have gathered by now, I find the artistic intersection between these two titans fascinating and was keen to understand how the music stood up out of context. On this new recording from the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Nicholas Collon, we’re given the concert suite that Sibelius assembled after the initial theatrical performances. It’s not music that has often been recorded, the best version to date in my view the one contained in Volume 5 of the Sibelius Edition devoted to the composer’s Theatre Music, by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Neeme Järvi (BIS 191214). Let me say at once that this new version is superior in every respect. Collon and the orchestra have a clear understanding of the work’s provenance, its inherent melodrama. The score is at times, vulgar and sentimental and the performers here embrace that. Did Sibelius need to portray the call of the peacock so insistently and irritatingly in the first movement by jarring woodwind calls? Did he really have to add castanets to a later manifestation of the same animal? Crudely interjected bells to signify joy in the last movement? It’s all a bit lacking in taste unless you show that you believe in the music as these performers do, who then proceed to render it with brilliance and passion and integrate some of those jarring moments with the more authentically Sibelian elements. That belief becomes, appropriately, magical, so by the end of the final movement one is left wondering why the concert suite isn’t performed more often than it is, being a far more worthwhile artefact than the play itself.

There are more relative rarities on the disc. Christian Tetzlaff plays the Two Serious Melodies op. 77 and the Two Serenades op. 69. The Melodies can be played by violin or cello or piano, but it’s difficult to imagine a more convincing and heartfelt performance than the ones here. They are symphonic in scale. The solo part is not really showy or virtuosic and actually becomes more and more introspective as the first Melody, entitled Cantique, develops. I loved the way how in this performance Tetzlaff’s burnished figurations emerge from the mysterious harp flourishes and timpani rolls at the start, and set the tone for a questing dialogue between orchestra and soloist. The second Melody, Devotion, feels darker and Tetzlaff here gives at times a slightly unsettling account which nevertheless has a beautiful, incandescent quality to it. The Two Serenades are not frivolous pieces but definitely have a happier feel to them than the Melodies and are more overtly virtuosic. Tetzlaff is both playful and lyrical in the first, making light of a solo part which becomes ever more stratospheric. The second Serenade is a little more sombre, and Tetzlaff and the orchestra engage in a delightful dialogue, which is colourful but ever so slightly muted. My reaction to both sets of pieces was, again, to wish we heard them more often, especially in concert, but for now I am very glad to have this recording for repeated listening.

If the Swanwhite music and the violin pieces were what drew me to this recording, having heard it, I wouldn’t want to underplay the mostly excellent performance of the Symphony No. 5 which is the other work on the disc. I hadn’t listened to Collon’s performance of the Symphony No. 7 with the same forces, which Ralph Moore thought started well but then faded (review). If anything I would say this performance is the other way around. At the start, it doesn’t quite have the sense of space or at times the apparent spontaneity of Rattle’s CBSO recording (Warner 5034282) or the imperiousness of Karajan’s stereo Philharmonia performance (Warner 2564624989), both personal favourites, but my goodness it builds impressively. The second movement has a lovely lightness of touch, an Andante almost Mozartian in its combination of summery surface colours and something slightly darker just below. The Allegro Molto finale is thrilling, the famous ‘swan’ theme suitably majestic, but there’s no sense of stasis as can sometimes be the case, Collon judging momentum here perfectly.

This is an genuinely interesting disc then, thoughtfully planned and excellently performed with superb sound. I have a minor reservation about the ordering of the pieces. In programming terms I think a better sequence is the one I have adopted for my review, (i.e. more or less chronological) not least because listening to anything after those famous final bars of Sibelius 5 is a bit jarring, and it is so clearly the most groundbreaking work on the album. A small detail though and one easy of course for a listener to correct.

Dominic Hartley

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