I came late to Sibelius. Maybe I’m too steeped in the hardcore Austro-Germans, but his method of composition didn’t really make sense to me until pretty recently in my musical journey, and it was through the Royal Scottish National Orchestra that his music finally began to fit. Pretty much all of the Sibelius I’ve heard live, certainly in terms of the symphonies, has been played by the RSNO, so they’ve shaped my understanding of the sound the composer needs.
So I might be a bit biased when I say that this performance of his Symphony no. 1 ticked every Sibelius box for me. The sense of flow, the element of propulsion that his music needs is right there in every vein of the sound. This performance opened with a beautifully rhapsodic clarinet solo, for example, but when the strings entered with the main allegro theme they sounded as though they’d had rocket boosters put under them. They drove the main theme with terrific energy in the same way that the restless, unstoppable winds drove the second theme, and every phrase of the first movement seemed to suggest that new, fresh energy could burst out at any moment.
The key to any great Sibelius performance is that sense of organic flow. It has to be impossible to hear the joins, so that you’re always taken by surprise to find yourself in the middle of an accelerando; or to wonder whether we’re listening to a development or a recapitulation, and does it even matter, anyway? Conductor Kristiina Poska understood that really well and she shaped this reading of the symphony with both understanding and poetic insight. In her hands, after the jet-propelled energy of the first movement, the second sounded like a soft-focused lullaby. However, the vigorous forward movement was always there and spilt over into a terrifically exciting third movement. Poska then gave a terrific sense of swell to the opening of the finale and ended it with a phrase that was both a brusque full stop and a tentative question mark. In short, terrific.
The rest of the concert couldn’t quite live up to that. Copland’s Appalachian Spring sounded beautiful in its airy opening, suggestive of wide-open spaces, but the music never shook off a veneer of politeness, even in the later dances which gained in heft rather than uplift.
Nor have I yet bought into the Florence Price renaissance. To my ears, she’s worth rediscovering, and much of her music is very attractive, including her Violin Concerto no. 2, but I’m not convinced that she’s an overlooked genius, something that the concerto demonstrated. For one thing, it contains way too much preamble before the main business gets going, and the opening music returns rather too suspiciously often for my liking.
Still, it’s a short-but-sweet piece, and as played here by Rachel Barton Pine, it sounded even more delicious than usual. She played this high-sugar treat with a luxurious tone that was matched by a rich, enveloping orchestral sound. Her violin was soft and lovely in the lyrical moments (and there are a lot of those!) but glittering in the faster sections, and it didn’t seem to matter Price seems to prefer the violin to dance around the orchestra rather than engage with it.
For her encore, Barton Pine played Nathan Milstein’s arrangement of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz and with it stole the show in her dazzling playing, providing simultaneously the meatiest yet most airborne thing of the whole first half.
