Voices from Finland

Advance publicity promised not only ‘Sibelius in the raw’ but also ‘one of modern Finland’s most original young voices’. One wonders whether Lotta Wennäkoski was flattered or put out by that description. An established figure in her mid-fifties, she contributed a dazzling mini-overture to 2017’s Last Night of the Proms in the form of Flounce. The piece was then included on a single-composer orchestral disc which went on to win a Gramophone Award. 

Zelo was similarly written to fill a designated slot, its Italian title translating as ‘Zeal’ or ‘Enthusiasm’. In five movements lasting around twenty minutes, it had thematic links with the much bigger Sibelius scheduled after tonight’s interval, not that those were necessarily intended to be audible. As with a good deal of the music of our own time, Wennäkoski’s iridescent surfaces impressed more than anything as Sibelian as an overarching sense of purpose. Even some oddly high-lying tuba writing just about came off. Shared nationality may not be the only reason one hears echoes of the late Kaija Saariaho in the distinctive feeling for colour, here fused perhaps with the less rarefied exuberance of Magnus Lindberg and the American post-minimalists. The third movement proved more abruptly ‘modernist’, reflecting the ferocity of its equivalent in the Sibelius that inspired it. The vigorous Adams-ish music from the first movement did return at the end. The work was warmly received, the composer present. 

Something epic after the interval then: a work much championed by Ticciati’s mentor, Sir Colin Davis, though rarely the same way twice. Where Davis in 1992 had Kullervo hurtle forward, brooking no opposition, Ticciati was faster still but curiously lacking in gravitas. Music suppressed during the composer’s lifetime and first taped commercially as recently as 1970, the score has made an astonishing comeback to the point that it is now being interpreted in radically different ways with durations stretching from less than 70 minutes to more than 80. This is theoretically plausible in a composition without a continuous performing tradition.  Ticciati’s take was notably light on its feet, sparing with the rhetoric and sometimes eccentric in matters of balance and articulation. It felt more operatic than symphonic unless you count the Brucknerian pauses. Technical shortcomings and awkward corners in the writing (Sibelius was in his mid-twenties) remained (deliberately?) undisguised. At around 50-strong the chorus was nearly as puny as the ad hoc group assembled in 1892 for the premiere but this one displayed sufficient authentic heft and focus to save the day.

Once allocated to strings, the first phrase of the Introduction’s main theme sounds less standard-issue heroic when allowed to culminate in an unstressed Finnish dying fall. Ticciati favoured a resilient full-throated thrust here but the direction of travel was not entirely clear, the mood unstable. It was the quieter episodes and mysterious transitional passages that worked best. The second movement had little truck with the dirge-like interpretation favoured by Osmo Vänskä. The third raced by without sounding sufficiently like a ride through snowy wastes. The singers, both Wagnerians these days, were not given enough space to project their drama. Nor were they much helped by the archaic poetic language of the surtitles. A native Finn, Värelä lately garnered acclaim working with the same conductor and orchestra in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Proms. It would be difficult to claim that she made a comparable impression here. Bass-baritone Shenyang’s final declamatory lament was kept moving to an extent that made no sense whatever. At least the choir helped made Kullervo’s Death more a high point than an anti-climax. The darkness most listeners associate with Sibelius was only patchily present throughout.