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Jean SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
Incidental Music
Turku Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam
rec. 2014, Turku Concert Hall, Turku, Finland
NAXOS 8.506032 [6 CDs: 399:31]

Naxos are not unknown to allow music-lovers a second chance to enhance their collections. They issue a series over a period of two to three years and then scoop the individual discs into a single box at a price that catches the attention. They did this with their ambitious British String Quartet series (Naxos 8.502021) and so it proves here. These six CDs, issued 2014-16, can still be had individually for between £6 and £8 each. Alternatively, for about £28 you can now have all six in this single package. What is the package? Unlike the British String Quartets, this is no minimal shelf-efficient slim-line box effort. Essentially you get the discs as issued, each in its own crystal case, shrink-wrapped into a moderately sturdy cardboard sleeve. Even so, this has its attractions as we will see.

At one level Sibelius and incidental music are not a good match. Can his music bear being incidental to something else - in this context stage plays that for the most part long ago loosed their grip on public theatres? If anything, and with the certain exception of The Tempest (omitted from this set) and perhaps Pelleas, the plays (many from the 1900s) now owe their precarious latter-day hold to Sibelius’s music not to their stage ‘reality’. If, like Walton, the dramas had been written for film then cinema and television would almost certainly have ensured their vibrant presence into the future. Sibelius’s music here may have been written to be incidental but now its very existence and the pleasure it confers is self-sufficient or at least dependent on the fact that it’s by Sibelius who has won his own secure world following.

The Overture in A minor was premiered alongside the Second Symphony. It is a low- key production with echoes of the Karelia music. The Kuolema music embarks with the music later to become known as Valse Triste. The play’s two songs have a subdued bleached beauty. Striking in this company is the movement which, in extended form, emerged as Scene With Cranes, one of the largely unsung fillers in Berglund’s and Bournemouth’s recording of Kullervo from the 1970s. The following Moderato stormily buffets the Baltic birches almost as much as The Tempest prelude and Tapiola. I was introduced to the King Kristian II music through Alexander Gibson’s mid-1960s SNO recording on Classics for Pleasure. Here it is again and this time complete with the vocal fourth (Fool’s Song of the Spider) of a total of seven movements. An adept imagination is at work here, rather in the manner of a Scandinavian modernised Bizet: melancholy and blanched, chivalrous and dramatic. The Fool’s Song, sung by Waltteri Torikka, works extremely well but its success is also attributable to a sinisterly impressionistic orchestral fabric. The disc has sturdy and imaginative singing from both Torikka and Pia Pajala. Torikka is notably successful in the songs from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Disc 2 starts with an extended and sturdy Overture in E major. This has more stormily stirring conviction about it than the Overture in A minor. I cannot help thinking that this might have had more currency if it had been given a specific name rather than a generic one. Its impact is no accident because this track and the next on the disc were the first two movements of a symphony which seems to have remained incomplete. That second movement found its way into the world under the title Scène de ballet and works well with its sly sideways glances towards Karelia, its stormy breezes, its castanet highlights and its long melodic line (compare Kullervo). Compare its effect with that of the Moderato from Kuolema - a play written by Arvid Jarnefelt (1861-1932) the brother of composer-conductor Armas Jarnefelt (1869-1958) whose few Sibelius symphony recordings have at last emerged in a 10-CD set on FUGA 9391. The eleven short movements of Belshazzar’s Feast might be familiar from the more often recorded four movement suite which I first came across on an EMI-Melodiya release (Leningrad Phil/Rozhdestvensky - ASD 2407). This is one of Sibelius’s rare outings into Oriental exotica - from that point of view it is a little like Delius’s music for Flecker’s Hassan recorded more fully by Vernon Handley. Belshazzar is a very affecting score, as its Dance of Life goes to show. It’s interesting how steady-pulsed and almost stolid are Cortège and Processional but the Menuetto is light on its toes.

The ten movements of the Pelléas et Mélisande incidental music are taken with dramatic deliberation and the opening movement At the Castle Gate forged an enduring link with several generations of astronomers through the BBC’s Patrick Moore programme: The Sky at Night. Beecham who recorded it for the BBC can be heard in it on EMI and BBC Legends. If you are curious, the astronomy links with Sibelius are thoroughly explored in an online A&G magazine article. There are other charms in this ten-movement suite, including the unearthly shiver and shimmer of the Adagio and the irrepressible Allegretto. Musik zu einer szene contrasts a dense and tense introduction with a tambourine-chattering waltz. After this come four orchestral pieces of the lighter Sibelius - crowd-pleasers and piano stool fillers. These late pieces were first typified by Sir Charles Groves’ collection from EMI in the 1970s.

The Everyman score runs to 17 movements and just over 49 minutes. It’s another late score and the music shows it: from a gaunt opening Largo to a sweetly prattling Allegro, each of which shows some affinity with the composer’s Fifth Symphony. The easily beguiling sing-song Dance Song is taken by Tuomas Katajala and choir in what seems an echo of villanelle meeting a national anthem It’s the first of a very attractive sequence of movements - some very short - for soloists and choir with orchestra. The little Allegro molto bristles along full of irresistibly buzzing vitality. The following Largo, sempre misterioso is one of the bleakest yet engaging of Sibelius’s inspirations and at over 13 minutes the longest of the 17 movements. This finds its dark sister in another lengthy movement: XIV Largo e mesto twinned with its successor the tolling lichen-hung Lento. The last movement (XVI) is a Gloria in Excelsis Deo for choir and tolling orchestra. The whole score is atmospheric and filmic. It deserves, in terms of fame, to be counted in the same company as the music for The Tempest. Sibelius did not draw a suite from this music. Continuing the Brahms-like grave theme are the Two Serious Melodies soulfully intoned by Mikaela Palmu to the foremost among the orchestra. These two short works are usually heard in company with other pieces for violin and orchestra - the two Serenades and the six Humoresques (Kuusisto, Tetzlaff and Kraggerud). This CD deserves a title the ‘Serious Sibelius’ (Death with his scythe stalks across the booklet cover) and it ends with the extended (13 minutes) In Memoriam. This is a march of deeply-scored Mahlerian mien; inward and with no public face. It is unlike Sibelius’s functional military or public pieces marches including the Finnish Jäger and Patriotic marches. Segerstam, who tends towards the expansive in setting tempo, does nothing to soften the impact. This overwhelming march was played at Sibelius’s funeral in 1957.

Disc 5 has two sequences of incidental music each timing out at roughly half an hour. Swanwhite and The Lizard. There are no sung movements, however the other two works here, A Lonely Ski Trail and The Countess’s Portrait, are melodramas with Riko Eklundh as the speaker - speaking in Finnish. The 14 movements of Swanwhite (Strindberg) are spun from a wan boreal understated light - sweet and at times (as in Elsewhere) tense. It’s a haunted Pierrot of a work and that imprint spans into the Adagio of The Lizard, written the year after Swanwhite. It has only two movements, the second of which is 22 minutes duration. A Lonely Ski Trail has a text that seems to speak of life’s solitary journey and its end hints at oblivion, even of suicide. A couple of years ago, intrigued by the less-visited John Buchan books, I read “Sick Heart River” in which Buchan’s character - Sir Edward Leithen - dying, pursues a reflective adventure in the wilds of Northern Canada. The music for A Lonely Ski Trail might easily serve as soundtrack to many pages in that fine book. Another reflective melodrama with nothing of ‘bread and circuses’ about it is the shorter The Countess’ Portrait. Although here the portrait lends the similitude of youth against a musical backdrop that is nostalgic and mournful. This is by no means as bitter as, say, Finzi’s song I look into my glass. In Sibelius’s case the ‘throbbings of noontide’, referred to by Hardy, are consolingly invoked with tenderness rather than exulting in ‘the fragile frame’.

The last disc has a single focus: the two act Scaramouche. It is thoughtfully tracked into 21 parts. This is fairly discursive stuff in which tension is often luxuriously relaxed. Try track 10 with its lovely solo violin. Frank echoes of the Fifth Symphony appear in the start of Act II and the trombone groans out in scene 2 of the Act. This Scaramouche, which runs to 71 minutes, is not the compressed and short (24-minute) selection first heard in the days of LP under Jussi Jalas (1908-85) on Decca (SDD467 reissued on double CD Eloquence 482 331) with an Hungarian orchestra. Incidentally, it should not be forgotten that it was Jalas who conducted the modern times Kullervo ‘premiere’ in 1958 (with the Helsinki City Orchestra). It was a tape of this that was issued on a rare private LP in the very early 1970s (Saturnian SJ-101); will it ever make it to CD? As it turns out there is plenty of rewarding variety in the musical topography of Scaramouche’s second act making the whole thing very enjoyable.

The six discs centre on the theatre genre but leave the entrance open to welcome other corners of the Sibelius orchestral catalogue. Competition is not an issue. The closest to come in boxed form is Bis Sibelius Edition ‘Theatre Music’ box and that 6-disc set sticks tightly to theatre. That Bis set gives The Tempest indulgent attention including the prelude and two suites as well as the whole sequence on two of the six discs. Segerstam and Naxos free themselves to roam through auditoria as well as among his melodramas, ballet music, early orchestral pieces, songs, lighter salon productions and stern scores. This lavish idiosyncratic coverage allows discoveries and delights along the way. No work among these ‘ancillaries’ and ‘auxiliaries’ is unwelcome. I just wish that Segerstam had also found room for Sibelius’s Masonic Ritual Music op. 113 which I was reminded of recently in a broadcast by the Finnish Radio SO conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste; not that it has theatrical origins.

The Turku orchestra and Segerstam are no strangers to this composer. Segerstam has recorded the Sibelius symphonies at least twice: once for Chandos and once for Ondine. The Turku players were front and centre in Kullervo for Naxos with Jorma Panula conducting. Naxos have kept implacable faith with the Sibelius symphonies with complete sets from Adrian Leaper, Petri Sakari and Pietari Inkinen.

The presentation and circumstances of each disc scores highly. The engineering in Turku’s Concert Hall is well accomplished without garish glitz by Sean Lewis, The English-only liner notes are to match and are by Dominic Wells. Where movements are sung (solo and choral) this is done as part of the play’s sequence and the words are given in full in Finnish and in English translation in the booklet for each disc.

Would that a similar Naxos series could be allotted to the theatrical and celebratory music of Nielsen.

All in all, this is a refreshing experience and often pleasingly surprising.

Rob Barnett

Contents
Overture in A minor (1902) [6:58]
Kuolema - complete incidental music Op. 44 (1903) [24:14]
Two Songs from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night Op. 60 (Come Away, Death; Hey Ho, The Wind and the Rain) (1909) [4:44]
King Kristian II – complete incidental music, Op. 27 [35:19];
Pia Pajala (soprano); Waltteri Torikka (baritone)
NAXOS 8.573299 [71:16]

Overture in E major (1901) [11:41]
Scène de ballet (1891) [7:59]
Belshazzar’s Feast (1906) [21:28]
The Language of the Birds: Wedding March (1911) [4:55]
Cortège (1905) [6:49]
Menuetto (1894) [5;45]
Processional (1938) [4:24]
Pia Pajala (soprano)
NAXOS 8.573300 [63:01]

Pelléas et Mélisande (complete incidental music), JS147 (1905) [33:34]
Musik zu einer szene (1904) [6.29]
Valse lyrique, Op.96a (1921) [4.47]
Autrefois (Scène pastorale), Op.96b (1919) [5.36]
Valse chevaleresque, Op.96c (1921) [4.47]
Morceau romantique, JS135a (1925) [2.36]
Pia Pajala (soprano), Sari Nordqvist (mezzo)
NAXOS 8.573301 [57.49]

Jedermann (Jokamies/Everyman) Op. 83 (1916) [49:18]
Two Serious Melodies for violin and orchestra (Cantique - Laetare anima mea; Devotion: Ab imo pectore), Op. 77 (1914-15) [10:17]
In memoriam, Op. 59 (1910) [13:15]
Pia Pajala (soprano), Tuomas Katajala (tenor), Nicholas Söderlund (bass), Mikaela Palmu (violin)
Cathedralis Aboensis Choir
NAXOS 8.573340 [72:50]

Svanevit (Swanwhite) – complete incidental music, JS189 (1908) [29:29]
Ödlan (The Lizard) – complete incidental music, Op. 8 (1909) [25:50]
Ett ensamt skidspår (A Lonely Ski Trail), JS77b (1948) [3:45]
Grevinnans konterfej (The Countess’ Portrait), JS88 (1905) [4:29]
Riho Eklundh (narrator)
NAXOS 8.573341 [63:34]

Scaramouche, Op.71 (1913) [71.01]
Bendik Goldstein (viola), Roi Ruottinen (cello)
NAXOS 8.573511 [71.01]