Few orchestras embody the music of Jean Sibelius as innately as the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra – and few carry such a double-edged legacy. To have premiered almost all of Sibelius’ major symphonic works is not only a badge of honour but also a weighty responsibility: every return to this repertoire invites both pride and expectation.
The evening opened with Outi Tarkiainen’s Songs of the Ice, a work whose impact was immediate and overwhelming. From the first gesture, the orchestra played with full force, generating a vast orchestral canvas of remarkable grandeur. The sheer physical weight of the ensemble’s sound allowed the audience to feel the music, an almost tactile sensation, as if one were standing before the formidable mass of a glacier. Against this, the winds brought a gleaming, luminous sheen, recalling the blinding brilliance of sunlight glancing off an endless ice field. Tarkiainen taps into the orchestra’s full potential, painting with broad, confident strokes that evoke both the crushing depth of frozen landscapes and the razor-sharp clarity of the far North. Under Jukka-Pekka Saraste’s spacious pacing, the music unfolded with a natural inevitability, at once elemental and intimate, vast yet finely etched.
A completely different energy infused Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D major. Here, tenderness and humour mingled with Stravinsky’s characteristic neoclassical mischief, the score constantly winking back at earlier musical traditions with a sly, slightly awkward charm. Pekka Kuusisto embraced this playfulness wholeheartedly. The opening Toccata crackled with rhythmic drive; the contrasting personalities of the two Arias were vividly drawn; and the finale’s quick-witted sparkle emerged through a delightfully conversational exchange between soloist and orchestra. Kuusisto’s playing was unrestrained in the best sense – committed to finding the humour, the humanity and the improvisatory spirit embedded in the concerto’s pages. The encore, however, fell short of the high bar set by the concerto. A loosely improvised jazz-inflected melody by Iro Haarla, it felt casual to the point of indifference.
After the interval, the orchestra returned to its spiritual centre with Sibelius’s Symphony no. 1 in E minor. The opening, a lone clarinet over a softly trembling timpani, emerged like a landscape materialising from mist. When the Allegro energico arrived, Saraste drove it with firm momentum, letting the dark-hued strings and the noble, slightly grainy brass project a distinctly Finnish sonority. In the Andante, Saraste allowed the quietly tragic themes to grow with unhurried inevitability. The central, furious eruption was delivered with gripping intensity, after which the return to the opening material felt tender and beautifully controlled. The Scherzo was muscular, fast but heavy-footed, its final stretto tightening like a pressure valve before cutting off abruptly. The Finale brought the emotional climax. The opening unison strings with brass strikes were grim and resolute, and Saraste kept the fantasia-like shifts of tempo and texture coherent and purposeful. Rumbling, unstable sonorities carried visceral weight.
Heard after the vast emotional terrain of the First Symphony, Saraste generously offered two emblematic Sibelius encores: The Bard and Finlandia. The former felt like a quiet epilogue, its solemn, archaic lines opening a moment of inward reflection. Finlandia, by contrast, arrived with unmistakable ceremonial weight, its dignified, burnished glow revealing the orchestra’s deep ownership of this music. Heard in Hamburg – a Hanseatic city that naturally resonates with a Nordic sensibility – the visit of the Helsinki Philharmonic in the first days of winter felt especially apt.
