Prom 20: Pekka Kuusisto and the BBC SSO - 3.08.19

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

19:30 Saturday 3 August 2019
Royal Albert Hall

Trad: Finnish Folk Music
Jean Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D minor
Trad: Finnish Folk Music
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 in E flat major (original version, 1915)

Pekka Kuusisto violin
Taito Hoffrén singer
Ilona Korhonen singer
Minna-Liisa Tammela singer
Vilma Timonen kantele
Timo Alakotila harmonium
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard conductor

Violinist Pekka Kuusisto memorably set the entire Proms audience singing a Finnish folk song in 2016. Now he returns for a Prom joined by fellow Finnish folk musicians, which sprinkles rustic Finnish folk music among two pinnacles of Finnish orchestral sophistication: Sibelius’s great Romantic Violin Concerto (with Kuusisto as soloist) and his Fifth Symphony – a work suffused with light and autumnal warmth.

Thomas Dausgaard conducts the symphony’s original, four-movement version, allowing a glimpse into the creative process of a work that Sibelius revised over a period of four years.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Does anyone know the reason for the "singer" being used here? Is is just considered as being the appropriate to the style, or is just a lazy term to save thinking about a more informative word? (Genuine question)

[Bryn]

Does anyone know the reason for the "singer" being used here? Is is just considered as being the appropriate to the style, or is just a lazy term to save thinking about a more informative word? (Genuine question)

Laulaga?

[jayne lee wilson]

Quite a coup to perform the original 5th as there is only the one Vanska recording. It was supposedly the only one the Sibelius estate would ever allow, but I tracked down a Lahti/Kamu live one online from a "Sibelius Festival" with very little info about it on a slightly odd website called "classicLive"...... I was surprised to find even that.

There aren't any others... are there?

[Bryn]

Quite a coup to perform the original 5th as there is only the one Vanska recording. It was supposedly the only one the Sibelius estate would ever allow, but I tracked down a Lahti/Kamu live one online from a "Sibelius Festival" with very little info about it on a slightly odd website called "classicLive"...... I was surprised to find even that.

There aren't any others... are there?

Just slightly disappointing that the Violin Concerto is not also of the original version. I certainly intend to attend.

[jayne lee wilson]

Just slightly disappointing that the Violin Concerto is not also of the original version. I certainly intend to attend.

Exactly what I thought (and said on yet another Proms thread ...somewhere.).... what a missed opportunity...(or failure of nerve...)

[Goon525]

The concerto was quite superb, a really imaginative player. And it grew rather magically out of the Finnish folk song stuff.
And, incidentally, the sound (via 320k feed) was very good indeed, better than I’d have thought this level of resolution could achieve.

[Bryn]

The concerto was quite superb, a really imaginative player. And it grew rather magically out of the Finnish folk song stuff.
And, incidentally, the sound (via 320k feed) was very good indeed, better than I’d have thought this level of resolution could achieve.

It's some few years since I listened to the original version of the 5th. I purposely held back from the temptation to re-acquaint myself in preparation for tonight and thus am near fully experiencing the 'shock of the new'. What a profound revision Sibelius made to the work!

[Goon525]

It's some few years since I listened to the original version of the 5th. I purposely held back from the temptation to re-acquaint myself in preparation for tonight and thus am near fully experiencing the 'shock of the new'. What a profound revision Sibelius made to the work!

Indeed.

[LeMartinPecheur]

Real bonehead question: did anyone else prefer the ending in this original version?

IMVHO the irregular hammer-chords of the standard version are an exciting surprise the first few times you hear them, but don't they get to be a bit of a pain at the umpteenth repetition?

[edashtav]

Real bonehead question: did anyone else prefer the ending in this original version?

IMVHO the irregular hammer-chords of the standard version are an exciting surprise the first few times you hear them, but don't they get to be a bit of a pain at the umpteenth repetition?

Let's forget 'versionitis' and take this Prom at face value: I thought it was a triumph of communication: the playing and interpretation of the two masterpieces was life-enhancing. The dark, rough hewn, emotional commitment of the violin concerto took me back and beyond Christian Ferras and Ida Haendel. The Finnish folk band setbthe scene, its timbre @nd its intensity. This was a great performance an a reminder of wh6 I love the Proms.

I'd heard excerpts from the original '5th' but never the full dissonant score. Gosh, it's very much "son of the 4th" : the Sibelius symphony that I most admire. I've heard the revised 5th bouncing romantically from the lake at Kenwood House and thought, " how lovely but, ultimately, such easy listening". The original was grittier, more harsh, less accessible and showed the turmoil that Sibelius must have experienced as Central European music took a more atonal route. The key, the tonic, underpinned by bass pedal points were crucial to JS, yet in symphonies #4 and, #5, he came close to throwing them overboard.

I loved the performance by Thomas Dausgaard and the BBC SSO. It was rooted in Finnish folk music and supplemented by the appropriate Karelian music that raised the 'selfie-obsessed' audience near to ecstasy.

A wonderful Prom.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And it grew rather magically out of the Finnish folk song stuff.

- Exactly the word I used when I heard the segue - made for a very special presentation of the work. Hauntingly lovely.

[underthecountertenor]

Magical in the hall too. And Pekka Kuusisto’s playing in the concerto was spellbinding. One of those occasions when it felt that the audience was holding its collective breath. The first prom I’ve attended this season, and I’m glad I did, especially as it wasn’t televised as it deserved to be.

[jayne lee wilson]

Credit to them for inventiveness but here at home at least, the folksong-led presentation didn't work for me....more a distraction really.... a live aspect which may have been great in the hall, but....I found it hard to get involved subsequently...I became so fed up (humidity and cat-management played its part too) that I took off for the woods during the Violin Concerto....but hearing the concerto complete later confirmed Ed's view of a gutsy, orchestrally bigboned, soloistically folk-fiddle-fantastical performance.
***

The almost-segueing of the folk-prelude-fantasy into the 1915 Symphony No.5 meant that the surprise of the missing horn call was diminished - always startles me however often I hear the Vanska disc. (I've heard Part 2 of the concert twice now, and still don't quite get the point of the prelude, given so much direct orchestral quotation from the symphony itself.....it might have worked better without those, with just singers, sparse accompaniment & violin...)

I didn't pick up any startling interpretive differences to that recording, though I felt the complex textures through the prolonged final climactic sequence did lack some clarity tonight, the strings in the approach to this passage a bit coarse and overbearing. (Comparison with the uncompromising splendour of the BIS recording may seem unfair but it is the reference; and the BBCSSO didn't play with quite the same lustre after the interval).
The ending of the 1915 5th's first movement catches me out every time! An extraordinary mid-air affair...no wonder Sibelius linked-through later; it sounds as if The Person from Porlock reappeared to another artist in medias res..
Dausgaard hesitated too long here tonight - in this version, (i) and (ii) really should be played almost attacca...it makes far better sense. He did point up the lifted rhythmic figure in the scherzo very clearly though.

I'm not sure the original Sibelius 5th will ever convince me as an "alternative 5th" (very different from nearly all the Bruckner Original Versions, the 2nd and 3rd especially which have long since taken their place alongside later versions as great symphonies in themselves).
After several recent hearings (avoiding 1919) I can't quite shake the feeling of a work-in-progress... too many extended passages of hovering tension, hesitation and repetition, which don't always have any obvious structural point or conclusion, despite a proto-minimalist fascination in themselves. Odd non sequiturs, fussy or extraneous subsidiaries...

With Bruckner though, even with the 1874 4th and 1887 8th, any structural abruptness is more than offset by the beauty and originality and symphonic contribution of much of the music later excised. (I actually prefer the 1874 finale of the 4th to any later versions, and the early scherzo is a very striking creation, far more radical than the lovably genial hunting one...).

Ed's referencing of the Sibelius 4th only reminds me just how concise and to-the-point that work is; the 1919 5th likewise; not a note wasted, not a gesture without structural or emotional point, in either. They are among other things masterpieces of restraint; of self-denial.
(The evolution of the 5th is far from unique a case: similar processes may be observed in the original/revised versions of the Violin Concerto, En Saga, Lemminkainen's Return...).

One or two string lines in (i) apart, there is little from the 1915 Sibelius 5th which I regret the loss of in the familiar version. The build-up and culmination of the original finale is very exciting, but still feels like 2 or 3 different finales or codas competing for space or attention; at which point referring back to 1919 does rather tend to underline the reasons for Sibelus' own editorial choices.

As if he finally saw the form within the block of marble...

[oddoneout]

Real bonehead question: did anyone else prefer the ending in this original version?

IMVHO the irregular hammer-chords of the standard version are an exciting surprise the first few times you hear them, but don't they get to be a bit of a pain at the umpteenth repetition?

Yes and yes. I'm not really a fan of Sibelius but found myself actually listening to this last movement; not sure I'd want to hear it again but glad to have had the opportunity.
I enjoyed the audience participation encore, one of those times when not just the sounds but also the atmosphere in the hall were relayed into my living room; a suitable wind-down from a tiring and somewhat trying day.