London Symphony Orchestra
For the most part, the concerts were gorgeously played. Davis has long been known as an excellent Sibelius conductor; he’s recorded most of the orchestral works, including two complete sets of the symphonies–once, to wide acclaim, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the mid-70s, and again a decade later, to even greater acclaim, with the LSO. (Both sets are now competing with each other on CD.) You’d think that this success would sooner or later amount to an invitation to coast, but Davis’s concerts at Orchestra Hall showed him at the top of his game. A couple of the performances were as good or better than any he’s recorded.
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The series started out on a dazzling high, with strong and well-conceived performances of Sibelius’s most drearily familiar works–the Second Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and the symphonic poem The Swan of Tuonela. These are the pieces that create for most listeners Sibelius’s characteristic mental landscape: that famous glittering iciness, like a limitless vista of glaciers; that deep provincial fascination with folklore and fairy tales. It’s easy to see why works like these made Sibelius such a popular composer during his lifetime. They are saturated in the Romantic idiom–in their sumptuous, post-Beethoven orchestral textures and in their sentimental use of native melodies and dances. At the same time they sound thoroughly original, without any of that threatening modernist dissonance.
There were those songs, first of all. I can’t say I minded hearing them; they were performed well by soprano Katarina Dalayman, and it was interesting to find out what sort of poems Sibelius liked to set. (Not surprisingly, they were heavy on despair, drowning, world-weariness, and “night-black roses.”) But they still only amount to a marginal part of Sibelius’s achievement. Moreover, as diligent consulting of the program revealed, he didn’t score them for full orchestra, but for voice and piano. The orchestrated versions we heard had been worked up by other composers. They weren’t bad, but they just didn’t sound enough like Sibelius to me–more like Wagner on an off day. I suppose that’s only to be expected, since Wagner was the dominant influence on composers back then. But I kept thinking that Sibelius’s own orchestrations probably would have been more original–if only because he hated admitting that he’d been influenced by Wagner and went out of his way to sound as little like him as possible.
Maybe the reason is simply that he felt obsolete; the musical tradition he loved had been overthrown, and he didn’t think he could compete with the revolutionists. That’s possible–after all, other composers in those days found the anarchy of modernism not liberating but strangling. But I don’t believe that a composer as ferociously inward as Sibelius would care about changes in musical fashion–or for that matter would let much of anything about the exterior world bother him. (That’s why I find the usual theories for his silence unconvincing.) I wonder if the reasons can be found within Sibelius’s music itself.
This is the side of Sibelius we didn’t get enough of in Davis’s concerts. Even in his terrific performances of the more accessible works–the Third and Fifth were among the best I’ve ever heard–he left mostly untouched that tantalizing and dangerous terrain on the edge of the abyss.
