This is the most satisfactory volume so far in Pietari Inkinen’s
new Sibelius cycle. Together with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
he presents a colorful, romantic, and well-shaped reading of
Symphony No 2. The opening is slightly more propulsive than
many, though later in the movement Inkinen finds ways of slowing
things down and dragging out pauses in a way that’s kind
of disconcerting. The slow movement goes very well, though,
the scherzo benefits from a great oboe solo, and the finale
is just terrific in a number of ways: the sheer amount of woodwind
detail, the way that the music relaxes so naturally and peacefully
around 4:00-4:40, the build-up to the end. Only the final chord
is amiss: it goes on for quite some time and then ends arbitrarily,
and dully, with no real sense of closure. It’s like having
generated an amazing amount of excitement over the last three
minutes the players all decided to treat the final chords not
as a glorious “Amen!” but as a practice go at everyone
trying to stop playing at the same time.
Strong points and all, I can’t really recommend this.
The Second Symphony has been done so many times, and done as
well as this, or better - how about Barbirolli? Vänskä?
Davis/LSO Live? either Maazel disc? My question to Pietari Inkinen
is: why not try something radical, something different? For
example, I think it would be interesting to hear a dramatically
fast, almost neo-classical account of the first movement, at
a tempo in which the various melodic fragments feel radically
segmented. The opening string chords would be staccato, like
a cold splash of water. Maybe the result would sound good and
maybe it wouldn’t - we won’t know until someone
tries. And I’d rather review an adventuresome experiment,
even gone awry, than just another Acceptable Performance. As
Carl Nielsen once exclaimed: “Give us something else;
give us something new; for Heaven’s sake give us something
bad, so long as we feel we are alive and active and not just
passive admirers of tradition!”
Luckily for me, Inkinen’s Karelia Suite does give
us something new. He conducts the short theatrical work as if
he were Celibidache: eye-openingly slow tempos, orchestral precision,
consistent if lackadaisical rhythms, and wind solos held as
long as possible. This flat-out fails in the first movement,
where the amazingly drawn-out opening horn-call had me staring
at my speakers in disbelief. I hoped the tempestuous entry of
the cellos would liven things up, but no such luck. The slow
movement would have fared better with more allowance for rubato
and expressive phrasing; despite the spacious tempo, the opening
wind phrases and violin restatement sound weirdly mechanical
and metronomic. The finale is reasonably close to normal, only
brought down by the lack of presence for the percussion - a
problem endemic to the whole cycle.
So the Karelia Suite does earn my admiration for the way it
very boldly tries something entirely new; this is Inkinen’s
most individual performance in the series. I only wish I liked
it. The suite was written in 1893, but is played here like inscrutable
late Sibelius. The result is odd. Maybe it would have been better
with more rehearsal time - it was recorded in a day - and more
time for the performers to deviate from the metronome in the
Ballade.
Pietari Inkinen’s recordings of the theatre music and
Night Ride and Sunrise were very good; his Third Symphony
was mighty fine, too. So why isn’t this Second special;
why were Nos 1, 4, and 5 outright disappointments? My colleague
Leslie
Wright has cogently described the surprising lack of interest
in this cycle so far. To his assessment, and facing this very
good recording of Sibelius’ most “generic”
romantic symphony coupled to a downright eccentric Karelia,
all I can really add is that conducting the music of Jean Sibelius
is a very difficult thing to do.
Brian Reinhart
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra/Pietari Inkinen 
