The BBC Concert Orchestra presented the Southbank Centre with an evening based around Sibelius and his Swedish neighbours, with expressive songs plus a sparkling ode to Trinidad. The stars of the programme were Anna-Maria Helsing, who was appointed last year as the orchestra's new Chief Conductor, and Swedish soprano Julia Sporsén, who glimmered in two different gowns and performed the songs of Sibelius, Ture Rangström and Wilhelm Stenhammar with expressiveness and clarity.
Kicking off with the ever-rousing political protest Finlandia under the majestic conducting of Helsing, the orchestra thundered through agitation into hope and fanfares with triumph. Lamenting and languid when required, with a powerful bass line keeping up the menace, this ode to the landscape and defiance of his home country set the tone for the night of Sibelius. Helsing held the orchestra in a state of command throughout the evening, each note precise but emotive. She was fully unflappable and completely in control in the face of the sweeping epics of Finlandia and Sibelius’ Symphony no. 1 in E minor.
Written in quick succession at the beginning of a love affair in 1924, Rangström’s two short songs constituting The Dark Flower are delicate and personal – and Sporsén treated them as such. Sometimes a little too quiet, her voice has a deeply expressive quality and she displayed economical vocal control. In The Wind and the Tree she handled the shifts from dark to light and minor to major with melancholic refinement. In the beautiful, hymnlike Prayer to the Night she showed intensity. Sporsén imbued the following – equally short – Stenhammer pieces radiantly: Fylgia was sung with grace and clarity; Starry Eye yearning and pleading, her consonants crisp, her voice lyrical.
Inspired by Bartók, Dominique Le Gendre's Concerto for Orchestra, receiving its world premiere, depicts her native Trinidad’s landscape: from a series of plaintive blackbird calls to the rhythmic echoes of steel band calypsos to the clashing of tenderness and percussive might. The orchestra is used to full potential in a layering of different styles surrounding the clarinet, with motifs poking through a vigorous and occasionally dense musical fabric. It’s a powerful piece which contrasted – possibly too startlingly – with the hefty nationalism of the Finnish composers represented here. The works did not exactly dovetail, but the evocations of landscape and nostalgia in Finlandia and Le Gendre’s Concerto passed for a theme.
The programme finished with a romantic second half spanning three of Sibelius’ love songs before reaching an evocative and resounding climax in his First Symphony. Sibelius’ art songs are lesser known than the bombastic Finlandia, despite the fact that he composed over a hundred of them. They tugged at the heartstrings as we heard tales of a brief romantic tryst, a mother’s disdain for a girl’s love and the heartbreak of betrayal. Sporsen performed each with energy, tragedy and occasional bitterness. Meanwhile the orchestra’s playing in the songs and the symphony demonstrated Sibelius’ range and texture, thrillingly conducted by Helsing.
