Classical Music

The Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä first came to my attention with the superb series of Kalevi Aho recordings he made for BIS. I came to his Lahti Sibelius a little later and, more recently, I heard his Minnesota remake of the Second and Fifth symphonies. At the time of writing the Minnesota Orchestral Association’s lock-out – which began in October 2012 – has resulted in the cancellation of all concerts and recordings until at least the end of April 2013. That’s very bad news for Vänskä, the orchestra’s music director since 2002, and for BIS; the latter are also affected by the turmoil at the Malaysian Philharmonic, with whom they’ve already made a brace of fine recordings.
 
Given that Vänskä’s Lahti Sibelius set was so well received one might wonder why BIS deemed it necessary to embark on a second one. For the most part concertgoers and music buyers have responded well to Vänskä’s latest thoughts on the Second and Fifth symphonies; indeed, my colleague William Hedley made the SACD a Recording of the Month. No question, these are supremely assured performances and, in the case of the Second, very spacious too, yet for all that they miss the fallible, all-too-human perspectives that inform the earlier cycle.
 
To a certain extent it’s about the orchestral ‘sound’; on both new discs the Minnesota band are highly polished – chromium-plated, even – but these dry, not very tactile Orchestra Hall recordings lack the warmth and breadth of the Ristinkirkko, Lahti, ones. Balances are rather different too, so that the gorgeous harp figures that start around 8:08 in the first Andante of No. 1 – Lahti version – are not so easily discerned in Minnesota. That said, Vänskä is never less than thrilling, and in both versions of this symphony it’s clear he has a rare and wonderful sense of the work’s architecture. What pulls me back to Lahti though is the conductor’s proselytizing zeal – a fire in the belly – that makes the music burn with a magnesium light and heat.
 
There are many instances in the Lahti First where one is drawn deep into the music – from the eloquent clarinet solo at the outset and those sheer cliffs of brass to that powerful accelerating passage at the end of the first Andante – a feat the Minnesotans can’t begin to emulate. Take the sense-alerting start to the second Andante of the Lahti version; such eloquence and inwardness are absent from the new recording, as is the timbral sophistication and presence of the older CD. In short – and thanks in no small part to a very well engineered, sympathetic recording – the Lahti performance breathes and palpitates in a way that the cooler, more metropolitan Minnesota version never does.
 
I didn’t intend this to be a panegyric to Vänskä’s earlier reading of No. 1, but hearing it in this comparative context underlines just what a superbly realised and deeply affecting version it is. The Minnesota sound – both the orchestral sheen and the closer recording – drains all the colour and character from the gloriously emphatic Scherzo. Not only that, but the unfolding narrative of the last movement is so much easier to grasp in the Lahti performance; also, at the close of the latter the athletic, forthright Lahti timps strike just the right note of finality.
 
If you must have Vänskä’s Sibelius in multichannel – it seems many die-hard SACD fans across the pond simply don’t listen in stereo any more – this new First will be a no-brainer. However, if performance is the most important part of the audio equation the Lahti recording wins hands down. In fact, I’ll wager that in years to come this landmark recording of the First – made in 1996 – will be regarded as a classic.
 
That said, the Minnesota Fourth has an unexpected trenchancy and power that is very persuasive, and there’s a glow to the sound that I don’t hear in their version of the First. Moreover, the weight and amplitude of this fine orchestra seems better caught than before. In the opening Tempo molto moderato I was transfixed by the quality of the Minnesotans’ yearning strings and louring bass, not to mention those Brucknerian brass chorales. As for the Allegro molto vivace it’s darkly skittish, and the In tempo largo is winningly phrased and remarkably well sustained. As fine as the more pliant Lahtians are in the Fourth they don’t always have the seamlessness and focus of their American counterparts.
 
The concentration of the Minnesotans really pays dividends in those long, gyre-like unwindings of the Largo; and for once I can’t fault the recording when it comes to nuance and detail. Perhaps the pared-down textures of this symphony – it’s central tranquillity and poise always a joy to hear – are much better suited to BIS’s recording set-up in Orchestra Hall. It’s only in the big moments that the lack of depth and ‘air’ had me longing for the fullness and three-dimensionality of the Lahti Fourth. I daresay the multichannel layer offers more spatial information, and that the sound is more immersive, but given that the vast majority of listeners are still wedded to two channels I’d welcome a more natural, involving stereo mix.
 
Anyone hoping for a neat either/or choice here will be disappointed, for the honours are quite evenly divided; the Lahti First is a clear winner, but despite the felicities of the earlier Fourth the formidable focus of the newer one makes it a front-runner too. That means serious Sibelians will have to own both. Now we can only hope that the hiatus in Minneapolis comes to an end soon, so that this impressive – if not always supplanting – cycle can be completed.
 
Vänskä’s latest thoughts on Sibelius are certainly worth hearing, but the splendid Lahti cycle remains his greatest achievement yet.
 
-- Dan Morgan, MusicWeb International

REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (11-12/97, p.201) - "...Osmo Vanska leads a slow version of Symphony 2, at 44:44 almost ideally paced....The orchestra sounds rich, warm, and full-blooded....[Vanska's] phrasing is richly varied and expressive, and his grasp of large-scale architecture is most compelling..."

It was with performances and recordings of the music of Jean Sibelius, his great compatriot, that the Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä first attracted the attention of a wider international audience. Beginning in the early 1990s, seminal recordings with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra of tone poems and the seven symphonies became synonymous with a new interpretative approach to the composer's music, with words such as 'clarity', 'intensity' and 'freshness' reappearing in review after review. Vänskä has remained true to Sibelius (and BIS), and recordings made by him over the past 20 years form the backbone of the label's newly completed Sibelius Edition, but in the meantime his international career has also flourished, including a highly successful partnership with the Minnesota Orchestra. On disc this has resulted in an acclaimed cycle of Beethoven's symphonies, and most recently with a recording of Bruckner's Fourth ('Romantic') Symphony, which in Pizzicato Magazine was described as 'exceptional... without doubt one of the finest recordings of the work...' Now, some 15 years after the appearance of his previous cycle of Sibelius's symphonies, Vänskä has returned to the works in recording, and with his Minnesota players he has recorded the first disc in a new cycle. The Sibelius expert Robert Layton, in his introduction to the programme, presents the Second Symphony as 'the symphony by which many music lovers find their way to Sibelius', and in his discussion of the Fifth he quotes the composer himself, in a comment about symphonic form: 'a river with innumerable tributaries feeding it before it broadens majestically and flows into the sea'.

Classical Music

Osmo Vänskä has been described as ‘our greatest living Sibelian’ (The Sunday Times, UK), a reputation which is founded not least on his two symphony cycles on disc, both released by BIS. The first one was recorded in 1996-97 with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, and firmly established Vänskä as a force to be reckoned with. 14 years later he returned to the studio for a second cycle, now with the Minnesota Orchestra, of which he has been music director since 2003.

The Minnesota recordings were released on three discs during the years 2012 – 2016 to critical acclaim: besides top marks from reviewers around the world, the series garnered distinctions such as Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), Orchestral Choice (BBC Music Magazine) and Recording of the month (MusicWeb International). The disc of Symphonies Nos 2 and 5 was included on the New York Times list of the Best Classical Music Recordings of 2012 and nominated to a Grammy for Best Orchestral Recording, an award which its sequel (Nos 1 & 4) received the following year. Recommended by the German web site Klassik.com upon its release, the final album, with Symphonies Nos 3, 6 and 7, was recently included on Gramophone’s list of ‘Top 10 Sibelius recordings’. The three releases have now been gathered into a box set, with the addition of the same team’s 2016 recording of Kullervo, Sibelius’s first large-scale orchestral work and sometimes called his ‘choral symphony’.

Past praise for previously released volumes included in this set:

Sibelius: Symphonies No 1 & 4 / Vanska, Minnesota:

The passion and sweep of the First is even more electric than in the Lahti First. The Fourth emerges equally well as a hugely powerful utterance. With superb sound as always from BIS, this new disc has set the bar for all to follow and past ones to be measured against.

– Gramophone

Sibelius: Symphonies No 2 & 5 / Vanska, Minnesota:

These fearless, magnificently played performances, recorded in astonishing detail by the BIS engineers, and accompanied by an authoritative note by Robert Layton, join a very exclusive and elevated class of the finest recordings of these works.

– MusicWeb International

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.



REVIEW:

Vanska's Sibelius is all about clarity - of rhythm, of texture, of intention. It is zealously unfussy and entirely without exaggeration. But it can stop you in your tracks. One just knows that the ear-pricking clarity throughout these performances is of Vanska's and not the balance engineer's making.

The suddenness of the hush Vanska manages as we enter the "no-man's-land a few pages into the Third changes the way the air moves in the Minnesota Hall. There really isn't much to say about this performance (of the Sixth), it just feels perfectly balanced - in music as in nature. And the work's evaporating final chord is startling. As for the eleventh-hour resolution into C Major in the Seventh, it is as emphatic as it is precipitous.

– Gramophone

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REVIEWS:
BBC Music (3/98, p.59) - Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 5 (out of 5) - This is a performance that grabs the attention from beginning to end; the Lahti brass have tremendous bite, the wind colour is in primary tones and the sweep of the piece has rarely been caught with such a natural sense of its ebb and flow..."

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These hybrid Super Audio CDs play on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

Kamu offers an easy sense of movement; intense, quiet dynamics and clarity in perfect equilibrium with atmosphere. There's plenty of excitement too: the scherzo of the Second is truly vivacissimo. Symphonies Three, Seven, and above all Six are just perfect, with all the naturalness I want in these elusive masterpieces.

– BBC Music Magazine

Selection recorded August 31-September 4, 1992.

To many, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra has become synonymous with excellence in Sibelius repertoire. Its numerous recordings with the previous chief conductor Osmo Vänskä have received countless distinctions and awards, and the orchestra is universally regarded as having a very special affinity for the music of their great compatriot. On the present disc it is Okko Kamu, Vänskä's successor as chief conductor, who wields the baton. Kamu has been a presence on the international scene ever since the early 1970s, when he made a highly-acclaimed set of Sibelius symphonies in partnership with Herbert von Karajan. Here three other works by Sibelius make up the programme, which opens with music for Shakespeare's play The Tempest, for which the composer in 1925 wrote the most ambitious of his several theatre scores. For concert use he later selected the Overture and two Suites recorded here. In 1926, a year after The Tempest, Sibelius again turned to the realm of magic in his masterful evocation of the forest, the symphonic poem Tapiola. The title can be translated as 'the domain of Tapio', god of the forest in Finnish mythology, and according to Walter Damrosch, who conducted the first performance, the audience was 'enthralled by the dark pine forests and the shadowy gods and wood-nymphs who dwell therein'. From the start the work has been regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces from Sibelius' pen. These two large-scale works are here separated by the seven-minute long symphonic poem The Bard from 1913, a work which in its treatment of the thematic material and the chamber-music-like quality of its scoring invites comparison with the Fourth Symphony of two year's earlier.

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The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra can with justification be regarded as ‘Sibelius’s own orchestra’, as it was this orchestra, usually conducted by the composer, that premièred most of his major works. On this disc of three such pieces, the orchestra is conducted by Susanna Malkki; the recording follows on from their three acclaimed albums devoted to the music of Bartók.

Although they were all later revised, the three works on this recording all originated within a very short period in Sibelius’s career: the years 1893–96, a time when he was beginning to establish himself as a composer and a time of national awakening.

One of his most popular works, the Karelia Suite is drawn from a series of tableaux that evoked events in the history of Karelia, the region where Finland and Russia meet. In late 19th-century Finland, the promotion of Karelian folk culture was both fashionable and politically relevant. The short suite Rakastava [The Lover] is a subtle reworking of a work for male voices based on lyrical poems from the collection Kanteletar; Sibelius often conducted it in concert. Sibelius often drew inspiration from the Finnish national epic Kalevala, and episodes from this poem provide the subject matter of Lemminkainen, a substantial four-movement suite (including the captivating Swan of Tuonela) that recounts the adventures of a daredevil hero, a sort of Nordic Don Juan.

REVIEWS:

Mälkki and the orchestra remarkably conjure the dark, swirling soundworld of ‘Lemminkäinen in Tuonela’ (the Hades of Finnish legend). And the concluding ‘Lemminkäinen’s Return’ canters along in roistering style.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Susanna Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra produce wellcrafted, beautifully detailed accounts on a par with rival versions – including the Helsinki orchestra’s own with Segerstam (with warm Ondine sound) from the mid-1990s.

-- Gramophone

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Internationally, Lahti Symphony Orchestra is closely associated with the numerous Sibelius recordings released on BIS, conducted by their long-time chief conductor Osmo Vänskä. These recordings have received an overwhelming international welcome among reviewers, but also among record-buyers: as of August 2009 more than one million Lahti discs released by BIS have been sold! As many already know, the orchestra does not only play works by Sibelius - its recordings of music by contemporary Finnish composers such as Rautavaara, Kalevi Aho and Joonas Kokkonen have all met with critical acclaim. Led by Jukka-Pekka Saraste, its present chief conductor, the orchestra now takes a step eastwards, and performs two symphonies by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. Having as a student absorbed the music of Webern, Scriabin and the new Polish school, in the 1970s Silvestrov moved away from avant-garde techniques and became increasingly involved with the idiom of 19th-century song: 'It seems to me that music is song in spite of everything, even when it is unable to sing in a literal sense. Not a philosophy, not a system of beliefs, but the song of the world about itself, and at the same time a musical testament to existence.' To date, Silvestrov has composed seven symphonies, of which the Fourth (1976) and the Fifth (1980-82) are both dominated by a longing for a beauty that used to be, but is no longer within reach. Considered by some to be his masterpiece, Symphony No. 5 has for instance been described as 'an epilogue or coda inspired by the music of late Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler.'

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This new Christmas recording from the male vocal quartet New York Polyphony treads a traditional path–organizing the program sequentially according to the Christian church calendar (from Advent through Epiphany) and primarily sticking to works with familiar texts and sometimes tunes–but from the outset gives notice that the musical settings will not necessarily be the ones you know–which can be a very good thing, or not quite so much. The familiar chant melody of the Advent hymn Veni Emmanuel opens the disc, the four voices in perfect unison–until an unexpected, biting dissonance on the words “Gaude! Gaude!”, repeated in each verse. While in the rest of the piece composer Andrew Smith couches the basic chant melody in a pleasing framework of combined modern and ancient harmonic ideas, this recurring, deliberately ear-grating sound (especially so with these singers’ superbly-tuned, super-vibrant voices!) seems forced and, unless there’s some kind of intended irony–a bitter call to “Rejoice!” for the coming of the Son of God?–this use of extreme dissonance just doesn’t make sense. As always with these things, others will disagree–and no one can deny either the singers’ individual vocal beauty or the impressive ensemble polish.

That said, throughout the rest of the program we hear many more modern settings of ancient and oft-treated texts, including two excellent ones from New York Polyphony countertenor Geoffrey Williams–Adam lay ybounden and There is no rose, the latter an ingenious and absolutely lovely joining of the text to the S.S. Wesley hymn tune “Hereford”, with added “alleluias”. In a nice programming touch (which I’m surprised isn’t adopted more often on recordings like this) three other settings of that same text are included, from the famous 15th-century “original” from the Trinity Carol Roll to John Scott’s decidedly “modern” realization and Richard Rodney Bennett’s masterful melding of old and new style, music that somehow simultaneously resides comfortably in both the 15th and 21st centuries.

We’re also treated to three versions of the text “Out of your sleep”, including one by the abovementioned Andrew Smith, who in this case casts the music in a harmonic world in which the dissonances that he obviously loves (and who doesn’t, in the right context?) beautifully and effectively enhance the expressive impact of music and text. The other two are the “original” 15th-century version from the Selden Manuscript, characterized by assertive, lively rhythms and oft-repeated phrases, and Richard Rodney Bennett’s equally rousing setting, included, along with the above-mentioned There is no rose, in his set of Five Carols, which are all performed here with the addition of sopranos Sarah Brailey and Elizabeth Baber Weaver. Although these performances of the Bennett carols are very well done, I prefer hearing them with a larger ensemble, which gives them a fuller-bodied sound in which you don’t notice individual voices–The Cambridge Singers’ renditions (Collegium), for instance.

The quartet’s bass, Craig Phillips, contributes two excellent pieces (under the name Alexander Craig)–a beautiful harmonization of the traditional Basque carol known as Gabriel’s Message and, a highlight of the disc, an original setting of a James Joyce poem, “Sleep Now”. You can’t complain about the lovely ensemble sound in Victoria’s beloved O magnum mysterium, but there’s something missing interpretively. The heart of the work, that incredible few bars where all is suspended, where the music perfectly captures and defines that precious, surprising moment where we are awestruck by the one who was worthy to bear Christ the Lord: “O beata Virgo…”, this, one of the most affecting moments in all of music, is rendered here as just another part of the piece. Even those delicious dissonances–yes, dissonances!–just go by without a scratch.

There are many other pieces on the program (24 in all), including a few more Renaissance motets and a very interesting modern setting of a not-so-familiar text, O pia virgo (O blessed Virgin), written for New York Polyphony by Michael McGlynn. It’s another of those skillful blends of ancient and new, and it suits the singers very well. As does all of this music, especially evident in the consistent command of ensemble technique, the presence that’s both easy and confident, and the kind of uniform vocal inflection and expressive nuance that only comes with a devoted and close personal and artistic relationship. In spite of a few reservations, I really enjoyed this recording–especially for the works by Geoffrey Williams, Alexander Craig, and Michael McGlynn, and a very fine rendition of the oft-recorded Bethlehem Down by Peter Warlock. It’s impossible not to be impressed with the work these four singers have produced in their previous releases, and this one joins the group’s much earlier (2007) Christmas disc, I Sing the Birth (with a slightly different vocal lineup) as one that will get plenty of play during the holiday season.

-- David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com [12/2014]

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BIS's Skalkottas cycle gets better with every release and it started very well' was the Gramophone opinion of one of our previous discs and this new installment will surely confirm them in this view. Two years ago Nikos Samaltanos put everybody in his debt with a double album of the piano music of Skalkattos - 'A timely release, urgently recommended' in the opinion of the Gramophone. Samaltanos returns here with a fascinating disc of concertos for various instruments - a previously unrecorded concerto for two violins as well as concertos for trumpet, oboe and bassoon or combinations of these - and piano. This music gives full reign to the adventurous and individual sonorities that we have learned to associate with Skalkottas. Another BIS/Skalkottas landmark!

SKALKOTTAS Concerto for 2 Violins (orch. Demertzis). Concertino for 2 Pianos. Characteristic Piece, “Nocturnal Amusement” 1 • Vassilis Christopoulos, cond; Georgios Demertzis (vn); Simos Papanas (vn); Maria Asteriadou (pn); Nikolaos Samaltanos (pn); Dimitris Desyllas (xyl); 1 Thessaloniki St SO • BIS 1554 (55:02)


BIS has lavished a great deal of attention on Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949), a former student of Arnold Schoenberg, who, like Alban Berg, took dodecaphony in a somewhat different direction from that of Schoenberg’s or Anton Webern’s. Kostis Demertzis’s booklet notes describe Skalkottas’s efforts to combine the system with popular elements that would entertain its listeners. He did so, for sure, in his Concerto for Two Violins (an unorchestrated version of which appeared on BIS 1244), a piece from 1944 that he never completed (or heard performed) and that he apparently intended to finish after he had completed his Second Symphonic Suite in the last year of his life. The Concerto’s first movement integrates the two bustling violin parts into an orchestral web (not only that of Kostis Demertzis’s orchestration but that of the engineers) more in the manner of Bach’s Double Concerto than in that of, say, Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. As did Berg’s Violin Concerto, Skalkottas’s slow movement incorporates a borrowed tonal melody, this one, according to the notes, a rebetiko by Vassilis Tsitsanis that Skalkottas had chromatically enhanced. This popular-style melody slinks, if not as suggestively, in the sultry manner of the Blues from Ravel’s Violin Sonata, though the outer, fast, movements have been influenced by, and pay tribute to, a popular idiom of a different kind—folk music. The Concerto is substantial in both length (almost 38 minutes in this performance) and in substance, despite its emphasis on accessibility and entertainment. While the ardent violin lines in the slow movement emerge, as do those in the outer movements, from sonorous, highly colored tuttis, the third movement returns to the whirlwind manner of the first, with the violins emerging now in bands of melody reminiscent of Corelli’s trio-sonata textures, and now in sharply articulated folk-inspired thematic statements. A brilliant cadenza about two-thirds of the way through the finale showcases the two violins’ virtuosity. The soloists play with great energy and élan in the outer movements and an appropriate sultriness in the slow one; Christopoulos and the Orchestra provide highly colorful, enthusiastic orchestral support.


If anything, the Concertino for Two Pianos (from 1935) sounds even lighter and chattier in its first movement, affecting a boulevardier’s breeziness (as did Poulenc’s) but couched in the rigorous procedures of serialism. Demertzis’s notes trace some of the tone-row manipulations, while the lighthearted style will—especially in this engaging performance by Maria Asteriadou and Nikolaos Samaltanos—tempt a willing listener’s ear away from those compositional elements.


The Characteristic Piece (from 1949), almost—almost—firmly tonal, serves as a sort of fireworks display that brings the program to a close in an intoxicating performance with all the carnival appeal of George H. Green’s Fluffy Ruffles . It’s like musical licorice, and it’s hard not to listen again several times.


Charles Warren Fox, the Eastman School’s protomusicologist, used to insist in his classes on the 20th century that dodecaphony didn’t necessarily imply any particular compositional style. Skalkottas’s music, placed beside that of Webern, seems to reinforce the point of view upon which Fox so vehemently (and disdainfully) insisted. In any case, even in an era in which serialism’s sun may be setting, Skalkottas’s music, for its energetic forging of a novel, syncretistic, idiom, should appeal to a new generation of listeners. Recommended.


FANFARE: Robert Maxham

Includes work(s) by Nikos Skalkottas. Ensemble: Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Nikos Christodoulou. Soloist: Póra Einarsdóttir.