Discovering Another Finnish Conductor

“Poster” for the DSO Replay performance being discussed

This morning I found myself reflecting on the extent to which my appreciation of the music of Jean Sibelius came about through concert performances of his music led by Finnish conductors. Indeed, one of the earliest such concert performances that triggered my writing about music on this site took place in the spring of 2007 when conductor Osmo Vänskä made his second visit to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Jean Sibelius’ Opus 39, his first symphony in E minor. I had encountered this symphony many times in the past, primarily through the radio; but it was only through the immediacy of Vänskä’s interpretation that I came to respect the rich expressiveness of this music.

As a result, my latest electronic mail from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra piqued my attention. The hyperlink it provided to the DSO Replay Web site presented a performance of Opus 39 led by the Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska, which took place on November 9, 2019. Stasevska is about 30 years younger than Vänskä, reminding me that, at the age of 67, he has achieved “grand old man” status; and a key element of that status concerns the prodigious number of Sibelius recordings made for the BIS label and its mammoth Sibelius Edition project.

Listening to Stasevska in 2020 turned out to be as exciting as my first encounter with Vänskä in 2007, even if this time the occasion was mediated by live streaming. Her full-body technique, supplemented with facial expressions, established her two-way communication with every member of the orchestra.  She clearly understood the broad scope of the range of the composer’s dynamic levels, meaning that she could command the intensity of the barely audible as readily as the composer’s capacity for primal roars. Indeed, the only downside to the experience involved the capture technology, which did not always balance the audio as well as could be expected and, similarly, had moments of video control looking in the wrong direction.

In many ways this DSO Replay account of Opus 39 complements the streamed performance of the Opus 105 (seventh) symphony conducted by John Storgårds, which I discussed this past April. As Sibelius grew older, he also grew bolder in exploring the rhetoric of ambiguity; but ambiguities have not yet emerged in Opus 39. One might almost say that Opus 39 gave Sibelius the opportunity to establish his command of symphonic architecture within the context of his interest in themes of Finnish nationalism. Those foundations were a distant past by the time he had advanced to Opus 105; but there is still much to relish in the composer’s “origins” story.

Watching Stasevska in action left me wondering if she would follow in Vänskä’s footsteps with as rich an account of the full cycle of completed symphonies as can be found in Vänskä’s recorded legacy.