Colin Davis and the London Symphony have achieved something remarkable here: the worst-ever recording of Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite, thereby establishing the absolute, rock-bottom nadir against which all future performances can be measured. Quite a feat! My good friend and colleague Christophe Huss at Répértoire magazine in France, in the course of a delightful phone conversation about this disc’s unremitting awfulness, had another interesting point. He said, in his inimitable French way, “It is also a fool’s project for RCA. How can they justify issuing at full price a recording by performers who, when they issue discs on their own label, only believe they deserve budget price?” Hmmm. Some food for thought there, you’ll have to admit, though this particular disc wouldn’t be worth your time if someone paid you to listen to it.
Virtually everything about these performances is terrible. Start with Davis’ interpretation: it’s both the slowest and dullest in human history. Mikko Franck on his recent Ondine recording was slower in Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari but quicker everywhere else and more to the point, infinitely more exciting in terms of rhythm and ensemble. Listen to the flaccid, tensionless strings in the love music of the tone poem just mentioned. Lemminkäinen obviously needs a dose–hell, a whole bottle–of Viagra. The Swan of Tuonela, at nearly 11 minutes, does more than evoke the mythological dwelling place of the dead: it sounds as if both conductor and orchestra studied music there. And speaking of the dead, Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, at more than 18 minutes, seems to go on forever. There’s a case for taking this piece slowly: to give the scurrying string tremolos thematic significance and to uncover important detail. But there’s no excuse for the slack rhythms, tepid crescendos on the bass drum, and brass climaxes totally lacking in the necessary bite and sense of terror.
Lemminkäinen’s return sounds almost unrecognizable in this performance. In addition to sloppy ensemble, plodding tempos, and careless dynamics at the opening (for example the initial bassoon entrances are marked forte and mezzo-forte, respectively, and these players get it backwards), the strings are late on their off-beat rhythms 20 bars after rehearsal figure 1, an incompetent edit chops an eighth rest out of the music four bars later, the timpanist consistently misreads his rhythms at figure 10, and there’s practically no accelerando to double time at the end. Nor does the cymbal player manage anything like the requested quadruple-forte as our hero drags his enervated and emaciated carcass across the musical finish line. This is simply a disgrace from first note to last, an appalling display of contempt for both the composer and the music-loving public (I mean, did no one listen to this fiasco prior to release?).
Pohjola’s Daughter fares no better. It begins with a solo cello that sounds unpleasantly nasal and lacking in depth of tone. At the first climax Davis underplays the brass crescendos and refuses to honor the sforzandos that Sibelius writes at the end of them. He begins the Tranquilo molto central section much too slowly, neglects to accelerate back to the initial Moderato as requested, and thus fails to make anything of the contrasting return to the slower tempo (this time marked Molto tranquilo). At the climactic final recapitulation the principal melody, tossed back and forth in snatches between winds and trumpets, gets lost in the accompanying string ostinatos, and once again Davis’ rhythmically flabby, dynamically challenged treatment of the concluding brass peroration lets down the show. As for The Bard, well frankly, by this point who cares?
RCA further curses this project with constricted, bloodless recorded sound that offers no sense of coherent ensemble, placing winds front and center, strings anemically in the background (or do they just play that way now?), and brass in a tinny little lump in the right channel. What a sad, pathetic witness this is to falling standards and a lack of good artistic judgment, particularly coming from Davis, a conductor known for his seriousness and solid musicality, and whose credentials as a Sibelian were, at least until his recent worthless round of RCA recordings with the LSO, second to none. Oh well, maybe we’ll get lucky and BMG will decide, having already inflicted it on Europe and Japan, that they should delete this disc prior to domestic release.
