The one composer that deserves individual treatment in the recordings that John Barbirolli made with the Hallé Orchestra collected in Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings is Jean Sibelius. Indeed, when he returned to HMV in 1962 after spending a little more than half a decade with Pye Records (which distributed in the United States through Vanguard Records), the composers that benefitted the most were Edward Elgar and Sibelius. Furthermore, where the latter was concerned, Barbirolli recorded the entire cycle of seven symphonies in 1967 and 1968. While more recent cycles have been recorded by major Nordic conductors, such as Herbert Blomstedt (who recorded them with the San Francisco Symphony) and Osmo Vänskä (whose recordings were included in the BIS Sibelius Edition), Barbirolli’s approaches to Sibelius could not be more perceptive and stand as some of the earliest beneficiaries of well-engineered stereophonic sound.
From a stylistic point of view, the symphonies cover considerable ground. The first three, Opus 39 in E minor, Opus 43 in D major, and Opus 52 in C major, present strong ties to the late nineteenth century; but it is the nineteenth century of Gustav Mahler, rather than Richard Strauss. (Sibelius was about five years younger than Mahler. The two of them met in 1907 when Mahler was in Helsinki, and they apparently had much to discuss about the nature of symphonic form.) The following year Sibelius’ health was deteriorating, and he had to travel to Berlin to have a tumor removed from his throat. In the All Music Guide to Classical Music, Chris Woodstra opined that this brush with death led to the composition of Sibelius’ Opus 63 (fourth) symphony in A minor.
1913 photograph of Jean Sibelius, taken no long after the completion of his fourth symphony (photograph by Daniel Nyblin, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
I have Michael Tilson Thomas to thank for my getting to know Opus 63. Unless I am mistaken, it is the only Sibelius symphony I heard him conduct during his tenure with the San Francisco Symphony. He was so excited by the thematic and harmonic ambiguities of the music than his pre-performance comments made for the most compelling introduction I ever heard him present. Much later I realized that I should not have been surprised by his passion for this symphony. There is a video document from WGBH on which he is conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a performance of it that took place on March 10, 1970, one of his earliest appointments.
Each of the remaining three symphonies has its own way of jolting the attentive listener, even if the impact is not as strong as that of Opus 63. Opus 82 in E-flat major is probably best known for the ways in which the conclusion of the final movement disorients the attentive listener with the suspense of sustained silences. The key of Opus 104 is specified as the Dorian mode (rather than D minor); and the ambiguities of some of its progressions might be attributed to the composer’s interest in the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Finally, Opus 107 in C major, the last published symphony, is structured as a single movement, which is so disorienting that Sibelius originally called it a “symphonic fantasy.” There are two recordings of this symphony in the Warner collection, both of which have track listings that “parse” the continuous flow into some semblance of a four-movement structure. (The Vänskä release consists of a single track.)
The other selections that Barbirolli recorded are relatively modest. There is, of course, the inevitable appearance of “Finlandia,” two recordings of the “Valse triste,” originally composed as incidental music for Arvid Järnefelt’s play Kuolema (death), and “The Swan of Tuonela” from the Opus 22 Lemminkäinen Suite. My own personal favorite, however, is the Opus 11 Karelia suite, which may have been based on Finnish folk styles but sounds to me for all the world like the soundtrack for a Spaghetti Western!
No comments:
Post a Comment