The bottom line first: If you want to hear Sibelius songs performed to the highest vocal and interpretive standard, look for Anne Sofie von Otter (BIS), Karita Mattila (Ondine), Barbara Bonney (Decca), and Ritva Auvinen (Ondine). Although songs, of the solo voice and piano variety, were not Sibelius’ strong suit, he did write approximately 100 of them, and many are quite good, even excellent–but tenor Hannu Jurmu, despite his authentic Finnish credentials, has a most unsubtle technique and a vocal quality that ranges from pushed to strained (listen to “Sehnsucht”, for example), with occasional welcome bouts of warm resonance. His approach to some phrases can only be described as leaning and sliding into pitches–“Vänskapens blomma”, for instance, sounds absolutely pained.
Yes, there are some “world-premiere” performances here, one of them an alternate version of one of the more oft-recorded songs, “Säv, säv, susa” (Sigh, rushes, sigh). And in this Jurmu successfully captures the quiet, mysterious mood of the familiar setting (allowing a tantalizing hint of a more refined technique) while unfortunately giving an unnecessarily hard edge to the less-familiar one. The somewhat bright, steely recorded sound doesn’t help, making the upper registers of both piano and voice unpleasant at times.
It’s too bad this isn’t better; it’s rare to hear a tenor in these songs, and it would have been nice to have the new material more artfully documented. Incidentally, for an example of Sibelius’ songwriting at its best, sung as near-perfectly as you can imagine, listen to Anne Sofie von Otter sing the Serenade on Volume 3 of BIS’s “Sibelius Songs” collection. Hopefully the next volume in this current series will feature a different singer shining a deservedly more favorable light on this relatively obscure repertoire.
