DSO Replay Recalls Ambiguous Sibelius

“Poster” for the DSO Replay performance being discussed

In addition to providing streaming video of entire concerts by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), the DSO Replay Web site also allows the visitor to experience performances of individual compositions. I learned about this only yesterday. When I first visited this site last month, I provided my electronic mail address; and yesterday I received my first “mass-mailing,” suggesting that I watch a performance of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 105 (seventh) symphony. Following this link, I learned that this was a recording of a performance, which took place on May 5, 2018, conducted by John Storgårds, currently Principal Guest Conductor with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada.

Storgårds can definitely be counted as a Sibelius specialist. He has recorded all seven of the symphonies with the BBC Philharmonic, as well as having recorded three fragments from the eighth symphony, which had not been completed at the time of the composer’s death. Opus 105, composed in 1924, is one of two symphonies that Sibelius seems to have created for the exploration of ambiguity. The other is Opus 63 (the fourth), first performed in 1911. The published key is A minor, but all four movements are fraught with tritones, the most ambiguous interval in the chromatic scale. The ambiguity of Opus 105 has less to do with harmonic progression and more to do with overall architectural shape.

Structurally, the symphony consists of a single movement (as is noted on the title page of the published score). However, its Wikipedia page “parses” that movement into ten sections. The last of these is marked “Tempo I,” suggesting a “closing of the circle;” but it is only four measures long! Sibelius himself saw the composition as a synthesis of symphony and fantasia but allowed it to be published as a symphony. The work opens in C major, but there is definitely a “pull” between C major and C minor as the structure unfolds.

Nevertheless, even the most attentive listener may have difficulty establishing just what is unfolding. For the most part the dynamic contours tend to be understated. The brass section does get its fair share of the score, usually raising the overall dynamic to a higher level. However, those variations in dynamic level do not necessarily establish any sense of a landscape of peaks of different heights of the sort that Pierre Boulez saw as fundamental to his conducting the music of Gustav Mahler.

As a result, many listeners may feel frustrated by the absence of clear climax, just as they are frustrated by all the tritones in Opus 63. The good news is that Storgårds still knows how to endow this symphony with its own distinctive sense of flow. That sense may tend to meander. However, the sympathetic listener can eventually get used to any unanticipated twists and turns; and, in the DSO Replay recording, the camera pays enough attention to Storgårds himself to allow the viewer to observe how he negotiates those twists and turns.

In other words DSO Replay has provided an account of a highly ambiguous piece of music that will facilitate the efforts of attentive listeners to negotiate those ambiguities.