{"id":28736,"date":"2015-09-17T19:43:09","date_gmt":"2015-09-17T23:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=28736"},"modified":"2015-09-21T12:56:08","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T16:56:08","slug":"notes-on-lahtis-jubilant-sibelius-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=28736","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Lahti\u2019s Jubilant Sibelius Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sedgwick Clark<\/b><\/p>\n

I had the great pleasure of attending this year\u2019s Sibelius Festival in Lahti, Finland, about an hour northwest of Helsinki. From August 31 to September 5 I heard all seven of the symphonies plus the early Kullervo <\/i>Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and a number of shorter works. Chamber, solo, and vocal works were also played, but I only caught a nice performance of the composer\u2019s wonderful \u201cVoces Intimae\u201d Quartet by the Tempera Quartet, an 18-year-old foursome of Finnish women. My review appears on the Musical America<\/i> website in two parts, on 9\/17 and 18.<\/p>\n

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Sibelius Hall’s woodsy lobby. Photo: Juha Tanhua.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I discovered two conductors I had never heard in concert, Okko Kamu and Leif Segerstam.\u00a0 I only have one of Kamu\u2019s recordings\u2014a Sibelius Third Symphony on DG that he recorded in 1969 when he won the Karajan International Conducting Competition. Karajan didn\u2019t like the Third, and when DG couldn\u2019t talk him into recording it to complete the cycle, the label gave it to Kamu. I think he also recorded the Second for DG (I\u2019ll have to look for that) because Karajan eventually did the First and Second for EMI. Kamu\u2019s bio says that he has recorded over 100 CDs; I have a lot of catching up to do!<\/p>\n

I have none of Segerstam\u2019s, even though he made a cycle of Sibelius symphonies for Chandos. The Gramophone <\/i>reviews found them eccentric, so I didn\u2019t bother with them, but I think I\u2019ll try to find them now that I enjoyed his concert so much. I doubt if I\u2019ll ever get to hear him live again, however. He\u2019s rather portly, and he shambled on- and offstage precariously; he sat to conduct, but his broad tempos certainly never lacked energy. When I googled him, I was astonished to find that he is only 72.<\/p>\n

This will be Kamu\u2019s last season, after five years, as principal conductor of the Lahti Symphony. I was quite bowled over by his knowing way with Sibelius\u2014warm, expressive, unaffected, relaxed but never slack or soft-edged, and with a natural give and take between sections. How rare all these qualities are in one package. Furthermore, so many conductors and, in the Violin Concerto, soloists play Sibelius\u2019s music lugubriously these days. I told him backstage how much I liked his tempos, and he chuckled, saying, \u201cI was told they were too slow.\u201d\u00a0 BIS has just released a set of the seven symphonies with Kamu, which I look forward to hearing.<\/p>\n

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Curtain call for the Lahti Symphony and Principal Conductor Okko Kamu. Photo: Juha Tanhua.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Like all great music, Sibelius\u2019s is open to many interpretive approaches, and they were in evidence in Lahti. Most I liked, some I didn\u2019t, and that\u2019s okay. Since his centennial in 1965, they have been increasingly preserved on recordings. Leonard Bernstein\u2019s unabashedly Romantic cycle (Sony) dominated our Stateside view of the symphonies, whereas in Europe the grandeur of Sibelius\u2019s Germanic influence was personified by Herbert von Karajan (DG and EMI). In the 1970s, the more austere visions of Colin Davis (Philips) and Paavo Berglund (EMI) held sway.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s reigning Sibelian is undoubtedly Finnish firebrand Osmo V\u00e4nsk\u00e4, whose Lahti recordings on BIS\u2019s complete works of the composer have won wide critical approval. To no surprise, his festival concert was excellent. Last season he proved his commitment to his fellow Finn\u2019s music when he resigned his Minnesota Orchestra music director post after a labor dispute resulted in the cancellation of his complete Sibelius symphony cycle at Carnegie Hall. The upshot: Sibelius and V\u00e4nsk\u00e4 triumphed. The musicians implored their conductor to return, and top administrators and board members quit. Carnegie could only schedule the first of the two Minnesota concerts in its upcoming season, and V\u00e4nsk\u00e4 told me he had heard that it was nearly sold out. The second is sure to follow.<\/p>\n

I expected this to be a short blog of postscripts to my Musicalamerica.com<\/i> review, but it\u2019s gotten out of hand. Still, I must comment further on Lahti\u2019s extraordinary Sibelius Hall. What a beautiful, sonically natural acoustic. Instruments are fanned out on risers, yielding distinct separation of the five string choirs, unique woodwind timbres, and gleaming but never glaring brass. The drums are effortlessly audible from the slightest tap to the most dramatic thwack.<\/p>\n

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Tuning up in Sibelius Hall. Photo: Larry King.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Christopher Storch, a former Artec partner who worked on the acoustics of Sibelius Hall and the chamber-music hall in midtown Lahti, was attending the festival. He explained to me that \u201cour goal was to remove as much background noise as possible so that the musicians could exploit the widest dynamic possible. When the conductor raises his baton, and the audience holds its breath in anticipation, one should hear nothing\u2014no lights buzzing, no ventilation noise, nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

What about those patented Artec acoustical \u201cdoors,\u201d which theoretically provide greater resonance when open. Jukka-Pekka Saraste wanted them open for his concert, and they were also open for Kamu\u2019s final concert in the hall. Acoustician Russell Johnson is no longer around for friendly disputation, but Chris and Larry King, another former Artec acoustician and a longtime buddy, were. I definitely prefer the superior instrumental focus and smoother decay when the doors are closed. I could close my eyes and know where every instrument was. To hear the French horns, positioned on the back left (audience perspective) of the stage, ricochet around the right side of the auditorium was most disconcerting. I can\u2019t believe that Johnson would have approved.<\/p>\n

The day after I returned to New York, I got a call from Musical America <\/i>contributor Mark Swed, who had just reviewed concerts at the Lucerne Festival in the Los Angeles Times<\/i>. A woman had walked up to him at a Santa Monica farmer\u2019s market and declared, \u201cYou should have been at Lahti\u2019s Sibelius Festival.\u201d Word gets around.<\/p>\n

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