Jean SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
Fire On The Island - Choral music
Rakastava (1893, revised 1898 for mixed choir) [7.13]
Six songs for male choir, Op.18 (four movements arr.
mixed choir) [7.45]
Busy as a thrush (1898) [1.17]
To the Fatherland (1899, arr. mixed choir 1900) [2.03]
Italian folksong arrangements (1897-98, piano part reconstructed)
[4.51]
Listen to the water mill (1906, fragment) [3.06]
Not with lamentation (1905, version with later corrections)
[1.28]
Men from land and sea, Op.65a [5.22]
A child is born unto us (1929) [2.52]
Hail, O princess (1896, arr. choir 1913) [1.18]
The landscape breathes (1899, arr. choir 1913) [0.39]
May the hymn of honour now resound (1897, arr. choir
1913) [1.46]
Contrapuntal exercises (1887-90) [14.46]
Three introductory antiphons (1925)24 [5.56]
Hymn from Finlandia (1899, arr. mixed choir 1948) [2.08]
Monica Groop (mezzo), Jorma Hynninen (baritone), Folke Gräsbeck
(piano), Harri Viitanen (organ)
Dominante Choir/Seppo Murto
rec. Nya Paviljongen, Grankulla, Finland, October 2009, January-February and
April 2010; Helsinki Cathedral, February 2010
BIS BIS-CD-1889 [64.55]
These recordings were made for the BIS complete Sibelius Edition,
that company’s mammoth and laudable undertaking to record
every note that the composer ever wrote. They are now collected
together and made available on a single disc, consisting mainly
of arrangements for mixed choir of pieces originally written
for male choir, fragments from incomplete works and small occasional
pieces. As such they will be invaluable for those who already
have many of the works in their original form and wish to investigate
further. The title of the disc is taken from the third of the
Six songs originally written for male choir in 1895.
It might be thought that these must inevitably be scrapings
from the bottom of the Sibelian barrel, but there are some really
good things here. The arrangement for mixed choir of Rakastava
is an improvement on the original version for male voices -
it was only subsequently that Sibelius reworked the piece for
string orchestra; and the setting of Ernst von Knape’s
poem Men from land and sea is a veritable tone-poem originally
written for a choir of 1300 voices. Even better is Song of
my heart, the last of the Op.18 songs for male choir, which
sets a poem by Aleksis Kivi with heartbreaking accents which
sound even better with mixed voices.
We also find Sibelius here working in languages other than his
usual Finnish and Swedish. Some of the Contrapuntal exercises
use Biblical texts in German, the Italian folksong arrangements
are set in that language, and we also have Sibelius’s
one attempt at setting an English poem in Sarah Doudney’s
Listen to the water mill. The last is an incomplete work
where the harmonies have been constructed from two different
manuscript sources, but they sound authentic enough. However
the piano accompaniments for the Italian folksongs are taken
from other publications of the period - the original parts by
the composer are lost - and they don’t sound very convincingly
like those that Sibelius himself would have provided.
Some of the other pieces here are short extracts from larger
works which Sibelius published separately at various times during
his life: among these The landscape breathes makes one
wish it were longer. The late Introductory Antiphons
were written for a commission for a volume of liturgical melodies,
but one cannot be convinced that Sibelius’s heart was
really in them. He very rarely set religious texts - there are
some not very inspired hymns in this collection - and the words
don’t seem to find much of a response from him.
Andrew Barnett, in the long and informative booklet notes that
one naturally expects from this source, tries also to make a
claim for the student exercises that the composer completed
during his studies with Wegelius as “fully worthy to stand
alongside Sibelius’s published choral works.” Well,
up to a point. It is clear that the pieces were written as academic
exercises in contrapuntal technique without any real consideration
for performance. The choral parts in The gates of morning
and evening, which Barnett admits are “cruelly demanding”,
go beyond reasonable comfort zones for sopranos and tenors.
Sibelius may sometimes have made heavy demands on solo singers
- in Luonnotar for example - but he was usually a model
of consideration in his choral writing. Also lacking here is
the sense of response to a text which was always part of the
armoury of the mature Sibelius.
Nevertheless there is enough on this disc to attract the interest
of specialists and non-specialists alike, and the singing of
the amateur choir is beyond praise. They remain unfazed even
by the stratospheric writing in the contrapuntal exercises,
and they get plenty of variety into the strophic repetitions
of the hymns and homophonic melodies which we find here from
time to time. Their pronunciation of the various languages seems
faultless, although in the English language piece they persistently
pronounce the long English u sound in words like to and useless
like the elongated Finnish uu. It hardly matters, and one is
amazed to discover that the members of the choir are largely
engineering students or graduates; in any other country one
would expect results like this only from fully-fledged professionals.
Groop and Hynninen sing their occasional isolated lines superbly,
although Hynninen sounds just a little strained in the Antiphons.
Full texts and translations are provided.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Scrapings from the bottom of the Sibelian barrel? In fact there
are some really good things here.
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