Vladimir Ashkenazy is in charge of the Philharmonia’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of Sibelius’s birth. Over the next few months, he’s conducting three Sibelius-themed concerts at the Royal Festival Hall; not a cycle of the symphonies but diverse programmes that include some of everything. In the first, which began with the inevitable Finlandia and focused on early works, there was no symphony at all.
Instead there was the complete Lemminkäinen Suite, the four orchestral legends from the 1890s that continued Sibelius’s detailed musical exploration of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic poem, which provided the starting point for so many of his greatest orchestral works. It’s descriptive rather than programmatic music, though in placing the most famous of the pieces, The Swan of Tuonela, second in the sequence, Ashkenazy did strengthen its sense of narrative. But though the Philharmonia’s playing, especially from its brass, had a satisfying bite, the performance was rather generalised; the energy that Ashkenazy gave to the outer movements was never focused precisely enough, and the third movement, Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, was allowed to ramble rather aimlessly.
Before it Vadim Repin had been the soloist in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. It was a performance of immense technical assurance – Repin didn’t seem to play the concerto so much as own it – but it was also one that remained utterly uninvolving. Intellectual rigour and tensile strength were missing, as well as any sense of freshness or discovery, and all are qualities that might have turned a supremely competent account into something special. The sense of mounting excitement that the finale ought to generate simply wasn’t there; rhythmically it was rather flaccid, however hard Ashkenazy tried to rev up the orchestral accompaniment.
• Further concerts on 17 May and 11 June. Venue: Royal Festival Hall, London. Box office: 0845 875 0073.
