This is the third recording of Kullervo to appear in SACD multichannel sound in just the past few months (the others being Davis on LSO and Rasalainen on CPO). If you’ve been waiting, then the wait will have been worth it. This is a terrific performance by any standard. Robert Spano is no stranger to the work: he performed it to considerable success during his tenure at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and his passionate, exciting way with the score has carried over onto this recording. The main difference is that he has a much better orchestra and chorus. Indeed, the singing of the Atlanta Symphony male chorus, nearly 100 strong, is the finest that this work has received. They articulate the Finnish text with amazing clarity, not to mention a big, bold, and rich sonority. Purely as a listening experience, their singing of the lengthy narratives in Kullervo and His Sister is spellbinding, while the grim final pages are glorious.
Happily, Telarc has found very good solo singers as well. Baritone Nathan Gunn has an aptly youthful and firm voice, with just a touch of nasal twang. This suits the tragic yet often unsympathetic character of Kullervo very well. Mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant manages to sound darkly intense during her lengthy suicide aria without turning excessively matronly. Her handling of the text is exemplary, even if the voice as such may not be ideally beautiful.
But the real hero has to be Spano, who conducts brilliantly. The Introduction has urgency and a genuine, epic sweep. Kullervo’s Youth is touchingly sad at the start, with very highly contrasted pastoral interludes that feature splendidly characterful work from the Atlanta winds. In Kullervo Goes to War, Spano offers both urgency and noteworthy textural clarity (the scoring in this movement poses some real balance problems). It’s a risk for a non-Finnish conductor, or one who is not a Sibelius specialist, to tackle this piece, but there’s no questioning Spano’s interpretive instincts, or his knowledge of the score.
Telarc captures the whole production in warm, natural sonics, thankfully less reverberant in multichannel format than in previous releases from this source. The balance between orchestra and chorus is particularly well-judged in all formats, and the realistic perspective on the strings (not too forward) only serves to let Sibelius’ not entirely mature treatment of instrumental color register even more vividly. Vänskä manages the same trick using a significantly smaller string section, but Spano has the best of both worlds.
There are now three really outstanding recordings of this symphony: Vänskä (BIS), Davis, and this one. Any (or all!) of them will make you very happy. This release further confirms the viability of this, Sibelius’ first orchestral masterpiece, as an international repertory staple and a major crowd-pleaser. [11/10/2006]
