Helsinki Festival 2007  Brahms:  Antti Siirala  (piano) Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Herbert Blomstedt , Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, 29.8.2007 (GF)

Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 and Symphony No. 4

Helsinki Festival is an arts festival, established in 1967 and held annually in late August—early September. It takes in music, theatre, dance, the visual arts, cinema and city events featuring both Finnish and non-Finnish artists of international repute. This year saw a guest appearance by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, led by Herbert Blomstedt, who was chief conductor 1977 – 1982. The same programme with the same soloist was also performed some days earlier in Stockholm during the Baltic Festival. The orchestra then travelled by boat to Helsinki and played a programme of mainly Nordic light classics on board. (See Baltic Festival review).

The Finlandia Hall is spacious and the acoustics are warm but vary considerably as Bill Kenny also has reported on earlier occasions. This time I had a seat at the front of the balcony and from there I had a splendidly balanced sound picture with excellent clarity.

Brahms’ first piano concerto – also his first major orchestral composition – is a long, grandiose and slightly sprawling work. There is a youthful exuberance that can be infectious but partly – especially in the monumentally long first movement – the grandeur of the orchestral writing becomes almost overwhelming. The texture tends to be too thick, too compact, and I have heard readings, both live and on records, that have made me feel exhausted. Not so, however, in the hands of Herbert Blomstedt. He may be 80 this year but both his appearance – lean and nimble as a teenager – and his musical approach belie his age and this was as youthful and transparent a reading as any I have heard. This was also to no little degree thanks to the fresh playing of the orchestra, lean and exacting and with tremendous power when Blomstedt let them loose.

The youthfulness of the performance was further enhanced by 28 year old soloist Antti Siirala, who must be counted as one of the most outstanding pianists in the younger generation with a number of prestigious competition victories to his credit, among them Leeds in 2003. Neither of the Brahms concertos is of the virtuoso kind but the piano part still puts heavy demands on the soloist, partly because of its somewhat patchy coming into being. It started as a sonata for two pianos in 1854, which was never finished. Then Brahms recycled some of the material for what was supposed to be a symphony, but this also came to naught, whereupon he combined the two unfinished groups of fragments into this concerto four years later. It certainly is more symphonic than most concertos and the piano part is also orchestral. Interestingly,  in 1873 he transcribed the concerto for piano four hands, so he went in a way back to basics. But of course we will never know how far from the original ideas this transcription is.

That Siirala is an outstanding pianist is beyond doubt and he executed the lyrical moments as well as the more bombastic section with the same superb control. As a whole this was a reading of the concerto that left little else to be wished.

Even better to my mind, was the performance of Brahms’ other ‘first’ – the symphony in C minor. Here we meet the fully fledged master, even though he was to develop even further and the ultimate peak of his orchestral production is symphony No. 4 with its structural clarity and classical balance. His tonal language is however fully developed and unmistakably Brahmsian in No. 1, even though he is clearly indebted to Beethoven. ‘Beethoven’s tenth’ it has been soubriqueted and there are references to both the ninth and, especially, No. 5: the same key, the same wrestling with the thematic material; there is even a four-note ‘fate’ motif in the first movement with three short notes and one long.

Herbert Blomstedt knows the central German symphonic tradition – the three ‘B’s Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms – maybe better than any other conductor today and he led a glorious performance: tight, well-shaped, no idiosyncrasies – he just let the music unfold organically and inevitably. The playing of the orchestra was also superb – I have hardly heard them in better shape. The only fly in the ointment was that there were so many empty chairs in the auditorium. Maybe it was too much of a good thing to have the Oslo Philharmonic with Saraste and Andsnes in, among other things, Grieg’s piano concerto the evening before.

 

Göran Forsling

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