Carnegie Hall, New York; March 1, 2010
Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra brought the house down last evening. On paper the program did not look entirely promising. Of course, Sibelius’ early Kullervo Symphony really is a masterpiece, its occasional immaturity as obvious as it is irrelevant, and it has been receiving a welcome amount of attention on disc and in concert lately (more on this shortly). Fans of the piece–yes, they exist– will walk naked across the desert to see it live. But to preface this 70-80 minute behemoth with Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” (in Michael Steinberg’s arrangement for string orchestra), all by itself on the first half, is more than a tad strange. So let’s be honest and say that it didn’t really work as a program, but there’s no denying the fact that Vänskä, a superb Beethoven conductor generally, has the Minnesota strings in top form. They tore into this awkward piece like a pack of happily unanimous demons. It certainly did whet the appetite for more.
Anyone familiar with Vänskä’s scorching recording of Kullervo for the BIS label knew what to expect here: some daring extremes of tempo (he takes the second movement’s “grave” tempo marking seriously, with unforgettable results), a huge dynamic range, and an intensity that never lets up. Not only did he have the orchestra playing magnificently, he also had a sensational lineup of vocalists, all Finnish, from the YL Male Voice Choir, to soprano Päivi Nisula as the sister who Kullervo unwittingly ravishes and drives to suicide, to baritone Hannu Niemelä, whose defiant lament at the end of the third movement was soul-shattering. Sibelius packed into Kullervo every orchestral trick that he knew or had just learned as a young composer studying in Vienna. Some of the parts are extremely challenging: the repeated oboe notes in the first movement, for example, or the wild brass licks in the fourth movement “Kullervo Goes to War.” The string writing is also extremely taxing as well as colorfully varied, from the “vibrato” cellos as the start of the aforementioned movement, to the “sul ponticello” ostinatos in “Kullervo and His Sister.” Toss in such tricks as flute and piccolo tremolos that go on for pages, and a triangle part that looks fit to give the player carpal-tunnel syndrome, and the result is a far more sophisticated and daring piece of writing than is often acknowledged. Vänskä is quite simply the master of every note. At the moment where Kullervo falls on his sword in the final movement, a passage punctuated by a pause several bars long in slow tempo, you would swear the entire audience stopped breathing.
The concert was preceded by a noteworthy event in itself: a discussion of Kullervo (and the Beethoven) by Glenda Dawn Goss, professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and editor of the work’s critical edition for Breitkopf and Härtel (available in a relatively inexpensive pocket score, by the way). Professor Goss has natural charisma as a speaker, and knows her subject as does no one else on the planet. She is also the author of a splendid new Sibelius biography, subtitled “A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland” (University of Chicago Press), that is one of the most interesting and readable works of its kind published in recent memory. At the other end of the evening, Vänskä and his team offered a smashing encore in the form of “Finlandia,” in its rarely-heard version for orchestra and male voice choir. After Kullervo, to be honest, the usual bit of fluff would have been insulting, and it’s to Vänskä’s credit that he offered the audience a dessert worthy of the main course.
David Hurwitz
