A digital restoration by Mark Obert-Thorn
ipso facto merits
attention. The first things we hear, however - the soft violin
ostinatos that open
En Saga, sounding papery and lacking
in depth - don't augur well. As it turns out, only this sort
of passage - fewer in all this Sibelius than one might fear -
is so afflicted. Elsewhere, there's an astonishing vividness
and body to the woodwinds and brass - the effect in monaural
is necessarily front-and-center - while the more full-throated
string playing is big and bold, with the cellos coming off particularly
well. The deep bass response is tremendous. Only the climactic
tuttis
of
En Saga, where the sonority didn't expand as expected,
made me miss stereo - but that just testifies to the overall
quality of the single-channel reproduction here.
The performances are mostly excellent. Ormandy's renderings of
Sibelius's first two symphonies, stressing their lyrical melos
and their dramatic surge and sweep - gave him a reputation as
a "Romantic" Sibelian. But in these tone poems, which
span the composer's active career, the conductor proves attuned
to the anxious ostinatos, unstable harmonies, and other forward-looking
aspects of Sibelius's idiom, while his feeling for color proves
an asset in realizing the expressive potential of the composer's
orchestral palette.
Some straight-up documentary value inheres here, too, as Ormandy
didn't redo these pieces in stereo for Columbia - as CBS was
known Stateside. If I remember correctly, the monaural LP stayed
nominally in print well into the 1970s, but it couldn't have
won many sound-conscious buyers. Meanwhile, it was Bernstein
who would work his way through a
Sibelius
cycle for the company. Ormandy did, finally, return to
Pohjola's
Daughter and
The Oceanides in his RCA Sibelius series
- which I've not heard - but the present performances appear
to be his only representations of the other two scores.
And it's those scores that receive the most convincing performances
here. The early
En Saga moves along forthrightly, befitting
the bardic work of a young nationalist composer. Attacks are
incisive, with the dotted rhythms providing a driving impetus;
the themes are shaped and stressed with a lilt suggesting folksong.
The opening of the piece, sonically compromised as it is, misses
the requisite Nordic chill, but the vibrant, searching passage
for divided strings at 10:16 is effective.
The Oceanides catches
Ormandy in an uncharacteristic pictorial mood. The string figurations
and flute motifs at the start have a suggestive, undulating lightness;
the sustained woodwinds in the following episode are plastic
and translucent. Dissonant sustained brass make ominous interjections
before the music breaks through to a climactic tonal chorale,
with the conductor shaping the closing pages in a great arch.
In
Pohjola's Daughter, after the brooding opening cello
and bassoon solos, the main melodic material hustles along, though
with better control than in, say, Gibson's hasty account - RCA,
vinyl. Incisively etched instrumental lines make for kaleidoscopic
shifts of color, with the conductor making tempo transitions
sound logical and inevitable. The closing low-string cadence
is clearly audible, for once, though accompanied by a conspicuous
extraneous rumble.
Some listeners will say this
Tapiola doesn't "sound
right": the Philadelphia string sonority is, again, rich
and vibrant, rather than dark and dense in the manner of Colin
Davis (
Philips)
or even Ernest Ansermet (
Decca).
But the singing phrases at the start are impassioned, while the
chattering passage shortly thereafter is impressively full-bodied.
Ormandy brings out the unsettling instability of the woodwind
phrases at 7:51, and throughout the performance, intense orchestral
colors impress the individual episodes more distinctly on the
ear than in most accounts.
The Alfvén is of less discographic importance, since Ormandy
did re-record it in stereo for Columbia; but it's an apt enough
makeweight, and notable for the restorer's elaborate efforts.
Obert-Thorn apparently had access neither to original mastertapes
nor to the original ten-inch release, and his source LP started
flat and became progressively more so. A painstaking transfer
has brought everything back to pitch. Ironically, the results
remain less good than in the Sibelius items, at once more resonant
and duller, with more miscellaneous noise around the ensemble.
Still, one can enjoy the violins' virtuosity in the final "drone" section.
The Sibelius performances provide more musical satisfaction than
most newer accounts - I'm hard pressed to recall an
En Saga as
powerful as Ormandy's - especially as the single-channel recording
comes up brilliantly. You might consider this, then, as a "basic
library" choice, perhaps supplemented by Bernstein (
Sony)
or Barbirolli (
EMI)
in
Pohjola's Daughter, and Davis in
Tapiola.
Stephen Francis Vasta
see also review by Rob
Barnett
Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene
Ormandy 
