Doesn’t conductor Osmo Vänskä have anything better to do? It wasn’t so long ago that he recorded an excellent Sibelius cycle with his Lahti forces. Indeed, if you consider his version of the original edition of the Fifth, this is his third recording of that work. It’s a very good one: Vänskä handles the transition between the two parts of the first movement with easy naturalness, and the coda is perfectly done. The central Andante flows poetically, and the finale soars aloft in its early stages, then builds to an impressive climax. But we’ve heard all of it before.
As if worrying that he had nothing new to bring to the table, Vänskä offers ample compensation in this version of the Second symphony, but not in a good way. The entire performance is strangely inert. The opening movement is exaggeratedly pastoral in a manner strangely reminiscent of something that Harnoncourt might do; it takes too long to wake up. The second movement is deathly slow–more than 16 minutes (shades of Bernstein’s perverse VPO remake, but without the same degree of devastating power). The scherzo trips along with admirable precision, but consequently with a certain lack of abandon.
When it arrives, the finale similarly fails to surge forward. The reason is easy to describe, and it’s not a function of tempo. Sibelius marks the accompanying ostinato in the trombones to be played at a steady mezzo-forte, marcato. Vänskä has his players attack this figure sforzando and diminuendo. The result is a constant sapping of energy, a lack of propulsion. Then in measure 31, where Sibelius marks the timpani figure “poco forte”, the player whacks the daylights out of it. These are some examples of interpretive choices that add up to poking at the music rather than playing it.
Vänskä is a very gifted musician. I have rarely heard him do poor work, and there is no way that even this version of the Second qualifies as “poor”. But it is self-consciously mannered, and given the fact that this release surely portends another Sibelius cycle, we can only hope that the mannerisms on display here don’t become signature characteristics of Vänskä’s Sibelius, or of his art generally. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I do strongly urge that he and BIS consider finding a project more interesting, and more necessary.
