A large international audience of keen Sibelians has made its way to this distant provincial town, and been amply rewarded by the performances so far, and this was no exception. There has been a Sibelius Festival in the Finnish town of Lahti since 2000, when its world-class lakeside concert hall opened. For this 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the festival has been extended from three days to a week with six orchestral concerts shared between three orchestras, conducted by five leading Finnish Sibelians; Leif Segerstam, Osmo Vänskä, Okko Kamu, Sakari Oramo and Jukka-Pekka Saraste.
This time it was the turn of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, escaping Proms duty to be here for two nights. On their first night they gave an overwhelming account of Kullervo, even finer than their recent Proms outing of this neglected work. This evening they were led by Okko Kamu, whose new set of Sibelius symphonies has been flying off the shelves all week. There were just two central works of the Sibelius canon: the Violin Concerto and the Second Symphony – hence an evening in the key of D, minor and major respectively. The Concerto was given in the revised version of 1905, the one now universally familiar.
The violinist was young Sergey Malov, winner of competitions in 2008 and 2011 and who also plays the viola, the Baroque violin, and the cello da spalla, but here was in his core role of soloist in a virtuoso late Romantic concerto. He is well suited to that role, with a gleaming tone and great dexterity. On this evidence, it is not a big sound, but it was eminently appropriate for the ingratiatingly lyrical opening, that long cantilena whose increasing agitation eventually awakens the orchestra from its somnolent accompaniment to a passionate climax, when Kamu could first give the superbly responsive BBC orchestra its head. Kamu and Malov have worked together before and they were very much as one throughout. The slow movement was sensitively done but also had a just perceptible sense of onward flow, never getting becalmed. The finale, once described by Donald Tovey as a “polonaise for polar bears” which, while zoologically unsound (a ‘burlesque for brown bears’ would be all one could see in the Finnish forests), at least conveys the lumbering liveliness of the music, which was splendidly brought off by Malov and Kamu. Malov got a reception that elicited an encore, which (fortunately) he announced. It was the dazzling Presto finale of Bartok’s Sonata for Solo Violin, a sort of modernist Flight of the Bumblebee, which seemed almost to contain nearly as many notes as the whole concerto, but in just five minutes. It could be the only music in this huge festival week, song and chamber recitals included, not by Sibelius.