Not yet 25, the latest Finnish Wunderkind (of partly Filipino heritage) began studying with renowned conducting teacher Jorma Panula at the age of 14. Today he has posts in Riga, Toulouse and Hong Kong, having appeared with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at last year’s Proms. Peltokoski is a Vaughan Williams enthusiast but in focusing on Sibelius with the LPO he had the advantage of an orchestra acclimatised to that idiom through the serial visits some years ago of Osmo Vänskä. Not that either one of the featured works could be dismissed as an easy option. The Second Symphony has proved difficult to bring off in recent years. Be it construed as patriotic or personal, its hard-won sense of musical affirmation is unequivocal. Perhaps this is why, in today’s cynical world, the Second has given way to the more ambiguous Fifth as the Sibelius symphony most often played. Not enough rhetoric and its emotional authenticity drains away. Too much weight and its peroration can sound pompous or, worse, repetitive and interminable. All of which may conceivably be linked to a loss of confidence in the kind of Western art music that is uncompromisingly big, white, romantic and masculine. A strange masterpiece it is too: two movements of startlingly original construction, the first evolving from fragments, the second bearing traces of its origins in an abandoned symphonic poem, followed by an apparently conformist pair in thrall to traditional 19th-century practice. Peltokoski’s solution was to transform the whole into a two-movement structure in four parts, like the Saint-Saëns ‘Organ Symphony’, the pizzicato ‘walking bass’ of the Tempo Andante, ma rubato emerging directly from the first movement and at quite a lick.
Peltokoski favoured a leaner, more focused sonority in this repertoire than, say, Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Philharmonia, but the confident sculpting of detail over a vastly extended dynamic range may have been disconcerting for Sibelians wedded to more direct readings. Peltokoski was not to be pigeonholed, neither consistently fast nor perennially slow, super-attentive and reluctant to let rip too soon. In another unorthodox decision Peltokoski deliberately played down the lead-in to the first of the finale’s big tunes, reserving extra clout for its subsequent iterations. The second theme was given the Finnish way, sounding less standard-issue heroic in that notes that once seemed to be upbeats to the following bar are rendered as unstressed phrase endings. Many of the same qualities were exhibited in Pohjola’s Daughter which opened the concert. Kristīne Blaumane’s cello solo had real narrative breadth and character, Peltokoski switching from a Barbirollian evocation of space and character to thrilling, Bernstein-like drive and back again. The seating plan was traditional, the playing resplendent.
In between, the highly marketable Jan Lisiecki, towering over his accompanists like a latterday Van Cliburn, gave a refreshing but perhaps slightly shallow account of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto. In his own commercial recording, he directs the Academy of St Martin in the Fields from the keyboard. Here he seemed at first to be doing so again. While he no longer transforms the minims of the third of the opening cadential flourishes into crotchets separated by rests, he does tend to peck at similar opportunities later on, his bright, forthright tone hardening rather. A technical issue with a piano string may or may not have been related to such aggressive tactics. In lyrical passages Lisiecki has a beautiful sonority for all that the slow movement’s opening chorale was delivered with classical poise rather than the hushed slow-mo sublimity of mid-20th century readings. The finale was frisky, a momentary memory lapse or similar failing to unsettle the unostentatious buoyancy of the rendition. The transition into it was its most unusual feature, rapt and magically hushed.
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