EMI Great Recordings of the Century 5 09693 2, 76:44 ****:
Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) discovered the joys of inscribing the music of Sibelius in the early 1930s; but in 1955 he set a series of works down to posterity in honor of the composer’s 90th birthday (8 December 1955). The setting of the Maeterlinck play consists of eight scenes (Beecham leaves out ‘By the Sea’), of which the character of Melisande occupies pride of place and duration. The scoring is generally light in texture, allowing Beecham winds and horns scope for their especial sonority, as in ‘A Spring in the Park’ and the ’Pastorale.’ Darker coloring for three Melisande episodes, where the oboe, flute, clarinet and viola become insistent and rhythmically alert. The Entr’acte throbs with the energies we associate with Grieg, and auditors have long compared ‘The Death of Melisande‘ with that of Ase from Peer Gynt.
Sibelius specifically requested that Beecham record The Oceanides (1914), his first and only reading of the piece, and its second inscription ever. The so-called “Rondo of the Waves” is based on Greek myth: the daughters of Oceanus were said to number 3000. Impressionistic in texture, the piece is both hortatory and diaphanous, woodwinds and horns evoking the nymphs riding on the sea, but the colors evaporate as quickly as they merge; maybe Debussy’s Jeux is a distant cousin. More than one edition of the score exists–the so-called “Yale” manuscripts–and it was not until 2002 that Osmo Vanska performed all of the extant versions.
The Symphony No. 7 in C remains an attractive and elusive piece at once. In one movement subdivided into four sections, it has a certain relationship to a Liszt concerto. From a simple scale, a series of motifs evolves, some of which “devolve” into chamber music settings, almost a concertino engaged against the larger body or ripieno of a concerto grosso. Intimacy and subdued grandeur inform the piece as well; it was always championed by Beecham (this is his second recording, the first having been with the New York Philharmonic) and Yevgeny Mravinsky. The first movement provides a kernel theme which the last movement will reveal in its more heroic character. The trumpet parts often suggest the Fifth Symphony, which Beecham unfortunately did not record. A skittish Vivivacissimo provides the RPO plenty of virtuoso opportunities. The horn section looms over an ostinato, grumbling bass line out of an active volcano. The Allegro molto moderato announces the heroic-lyrical theme – a gesture, really, to the stars that much of the 20th Century blotted out. The last pages radiate a sustained epiphany, an apotheosis of shimmering power.
Finally, Beecham’s recording of Tapiola (1926), a tone poem which made little sense to me until its architecture was revealed in a performance by the Syracuse Symphony under Eleazar de Carvalho. Ostensibly, the music invokes the demonic spirit of the Finnish pine forests, a locale for terror, eerie beauty, and awe. The opening, rumbling motif assumes a number of incarnations, some of them infused with heart-rending longing and magical pantheism. Historically, this mazy tone-poem is the last composition Sibelius published, despite his living another 30 years. If anyone were a self-appointed guardian of its tonal treasures, it was the inimitable Sir Thomas Beecham.
— Gary Lemco
