Boult conducts SIBELIUS = Prelude to The Tempest, Op. 109, No. 1; Finlandia, Op. 26; Tapiola, Op. 112; The Oceanides, Op. 73; Night Ride and Sunrise, Op. 55; Pohjola’s Daughter, Op. 49 – London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Adrian Boult
Somm CD 093, 69:05 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
These 1956 inscriptions of Sibelius tone poems and incidental works remind us just how much sympathetic energy Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1893) could muster, reason enough for him to have been dubbed “the British Toscanini,” considering their mutual obligations to conductor-pedagogues Arthur Nikisch and Fritz Steinbach. A literalist interpreter with a penchant for fast driven tempos, Boult elicits the passionate, patriotic juice from a standard classic like Finlandia in just seven and one-half minutes, but what a rush of fervor it leaves in its wake!
Sibelius connoisseurs will recall that the Vanguard LP record label offered the cycle of tone-poems Boult inscribed for the Nixa label; this set, however, omits both En Saga and The Bard, for which we can but hope for another CD incarnation. The1926 Tapiola has had adherents by way of Beecham and Karajan–I once heard a masterful performance in Syracuse under Eleazar de Carvalho–and with Boult its aggressive, throbbing, Northern sensibilities emanate an eerie sense of form–a B Minor rondo in the manner of Debussy’s Jeux–based on Sibelius’ conception of the Finnish god Tapio, the spirit of the mighty forests. The cold wind that that freezes the air near the conclusion must have inspired the sounds in Vaughan Williams’ Antarctic Symphony. The insistent pungent realization by the London Philharmonic quite disturbs our sonic universe, and we must sit agog at the thought that no record company ever invited Boult to record a cycle of the Sibelius symphonies.
The most elusive of the “symphonic fantasias” by Sibelius, the 1914 The Oceanides, results from a Norfolk Festival commission; when Sibelius led the first performance–during his only visit to America–he entitled the piece a “symphonic legend.” Ostensibly a depiction of Nymphs of the Ocean of Homeric myth, the lyrical but harmonically nebulous piece progresses in “three waves” or variations in flux and orchestration. The LPO woodwinds take the berries in this rendition, the flute principal assisted by splendid harmonics from the orchestra harp. The string intensity–the doublings of many instrument set as parallel fourths–creates a fierce climax that more than suggests the power of the sea. More extraordinary coloration permeates the 1909 Night Ride and Sunrise, set in two parts, a fierce gallop and a kaleidoscopic vision of the rising sun. Strings in agogics and snare drum collaborate to light up the night ride, in which passing woodwind riffs could allude to the spectacular Northern Lights. Typically, Sibelius builds much of his tension on tympanic pedal points of modal power.
Conductors as far afield stylistically as Bernstein and Ozawa have gravitated to Pohjola’s Daughter (1906), a tale from the Kalevala of Vainamoinen, an elderly ruler who espies and covets a lovely girl seated on a rainbow spinning cloth of gold. She denies him, but not before having set him a series of Herculean labors that ultimately thwarts him and send him onward alone. The lush scoring and bold expletives from the woodwinds–some of which allude to the girl’s laughter at our hero’s successive failures–provide sweeping testimony to the manic homogeneity of sound Boult ushers from his players, a classic of its kind. Literalism informs Sibelius’ incidental music (1926) for Shakespeare’s The Tempest–in an originally Danish production in Copenhagen–the heaving storm clearly menacing the ship that will deposit the travelers on Prospero’s magic island. Besides tumultuous wind and water, we can hear a note of magic in the air, which we may as well ascribe to the presence of an immensely gifted Adrian Boult.
–Gary Lemco
