Since his first days as a conductor, Sir Simon Rattle has been a Sibelius fan. In December 2014 and February 2015, celebrating the composer’s 150th anniversary, he recorded Sibelius’ Symphonies 1-7 together with the Berliner Philharmoniker / Berlin Philharmonic (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de and Amazon.fr). He said about the composer: “In my view, Sibelius is one of the most staggeringly original composers that there is. He is an absolute grandmaster of form, which he reinvents again and again with every composition.”
The edition reviewed here contains 4 CDs including the seven symphonies, an audio and a video Blu-Ray disc also including the seven symphonies, an extensive interview with Sir Simon Rattle as well as a 64-page booklet in German and English.
Sir Simon Rattle surely helped the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra make great progress under his direction, partly also due to a new concert hall. As the direct successor to the late and great Claudio Abbado as the principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, although celebrated like a rock star by the younger fans of the orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle remained in the shadow of his outstanding predecessor. Nevertheless, Rattle’s 2014/15 Sibelius live recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic deserve recognition as a fine artistic achievement.
Sir Simon Rattle: photo copyright Berliner Philharmoniker.
Jean Sibelius’ First Symphony is a delight to listen to. Composed in 1898/99, revised in 1900 and probably inspired by Peter Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony as well as a descending sighing motif repeatedly used by Edvard Grieg. Sibelius’ most conventional, but also most exuberant symphony convinces from the start with warm, romantic, precise and engaging strings and woodwind instruments played by one of the world’s leading orchestras. You immediately travel back to the 19th century. Several instruments get to shine alone, starting with the solo clarinet at the very beginning. The composition itself as well as the present performance are never dull and offer drama, emotions, pathos, melodies, contrasts and plenty of moments for the orchestra players to show off their skills, individually and in concert.
The Second Symphony was largely composed in the winter of 1901 at the Gulf of Tigullio, southeast of Genoa, but finished the following year in Finland. The composition radiates Italian character. Its second movement was especially liked by the Italian composer, pianist and conductor Ferruccio Busoni, a friend of Sibelius. Many Finns claimed that the composition was new in style, patriotic, “national”; Jean Sibelius grew up speaking Swedish in a land that was part of Russia and declared independent only after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Sibelius wrote his famous tone poem Finlandia in 1899 as a covet protest against increasing censorship from Imperial Russia. The rendition of the Second Symphony by Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic seems to translate well the Finnish national aspirations and the protest against injustice, including the heroic finale.
Jean Sibelius in 1913. Photo Wikimedia Commons/ Wikipedia public domain.
The Third Symphony, written between 1904 and 1907, is considered partly neoclassical, a break with the national and romantic works he wrote previously. Sibelius finds his personal style between folklore, classicism and the modern era. For me, the Fourth Symphony (1909-11) with its use of chromaticism and dissonance is the even stronger break with the past. Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker play it at times both, transparently polished and enigmatic. This is the first recording of the Third by the Berlin Philharmonic.
In 1908, Sibelius had a cancerous tumour successfully removed from his throat. But in the following years, he lived in fear of the tumour recurring. Maybe as a result of this personal drama, the Fourth is a modern masterpiece. According to Simon Rattle, the first movement of the Fourth “concentrates Wagner’s Parsifal”. It is one if not the highlight of the box set.
The glorious Fifth Symphony (1914-15, revised in 1919) is uplifting and encouraging in tone, and so is the interpretation by Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. The influence of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss is palpable. The composition is a step back from the road towards contemporary music engaged by Sibelius with his Fourth Symphony. At the same time, according to the musicologist Veijo Murtomäki, it was a step towards the ideal of symphonic unity. Incidentally, the Fifth was commissioned by the Finnish government to celebrate Sibelius’ 50th birthday, which had been delcared a national holiday.
In the first three movements of the Sixth Symphony (1914-23), Sibelius experiments with a new harmonic language. In his own words, music had become an “expression of a spiritual creed, a phase in one’s inner life”. A critic described the composition as “a poem within the framework of a symphony”.
According to Rattle, the Sixth and the Seventh come from the same material and should be played together, without interruption.
The Seventh (1918-24) is a one movement symphony, the result of a search for a symphonic fantasy form. Strings dominate, with a trombone theme playing an important part too. It is a composition in which everything is connected to everything. Sir Simon Rattle said that “Sibelius is so concentrated and exact (…). With Sibelius you feel that if one drop touched your skin it would burn right through the bone.” According to the musicologist Veijo Murtomäki, with the Seventh Symphony, “the era of minor-major tonality inevitably came to an end – but how magnificently!”
Sibelius lived another 33 years and continued to compose. However, with the exception of his symphonic poem Tapiola, nothing substantial came out of it. One reason was that he had started to drink again; whisky became his companion. In the 1940s, as a result of his self-criticism, he burned the manuscript of his (finished?) Eight Symphony.
Order the box set Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle: Jean Sibelius Symphonies 1-7 containing 4 CDs, one pure audio Blu-Ray disc, one video Blu-Ray disc and a 64-page booklet in German and English (which was helpful in writing this music review) from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de and Amazon.fr.
Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Photo copyright: Berliner Philharmoniker.
