Madetoja: Symphony No. 2 and Kullervo – Storgårds

Poor Madetoja. History assigned him the role of the man who studied with Sibelius and never quite got out from under the shadow — a fate not unlike being Salieri to somebody else’s Mozart, except that Madetoja’s music is better than that comparison allows, and stranger, too, in ways that repeated listening keeps uncovering.

This new Ondine disc, from a label that has by now made something like a house specialty of Madetoja rehabilitation, gives us a compact and shrewdly assembled portrait: early, elegiac Madetoja; Kalevala Madetoja; and the war-haunted Madetoja of the Second Symphony. John Storgårds and the Helsinki Philharmonic play as though they believe in this music completely. That counts for a great deal when the composer himself so often seems to be arguing with his own material.

Start with the Elegy, op. 4/1. Five minutes of string writing that Robert Kajanus premiered in 1910 to real acclaim, before Madetoja folded it into his Symphonic Suite. It is tender without ever curdling into sentimentality, and Storgårds refuses to let it droop into a dirge. The pulse keeps moving underneath the sorrow. There’s a lovely translucency to the Helsinki strings here, individual desks breathing together, a kind of collective exhale rather than the monolithic wash some Nordic orchestras favor. Kajanus himself would probably have approved.

Kullervo, the 1913 symphonic poem, is trickier repertoire to love. Sibelius had already claimed this corner of the Kalevala for himself — his own choral Kullervo symphony dates from 1892 — and Madetoja’s response feels almost defiantly different in method: short blocks of contrasting material rather than Sibelius’s long spun threads, ideas that arrive, assert themselves, and depart without quite accumulating into inevitability. Thematically it doesn’t linger in the memory the way the composer probably hoped. But Storgårds conducts as if he doesn’t share that reservation, attacking the rhythmic profile with real conviction, and there’s a granite-hard assurance to the brass playing that goes some distance toward disguising the music’s structural fragility.

The main event is the Symphony No. 2, composed in 1918, in the immediate wake of Finland’s civil war, a war that killed Madetoja’s brother and, soon after, a close friend. You hear the wound. Not literally, not programmatically, but in the emotional temperature of the piece, which runs colder and angrier than anything in the Kullervo score.

The opening Allegro moderato announces itself with a broad, confident melodic gesture, almost too confident, as though the composer were insisting on an equilibrium he didn’t quite feel. The Andante that follows opens with a genuinely lovely oboe solo, pastoral, unhurried, and then rather overstays its welcome. Nice tune; too many repetitions of it. It’s the third movement, an Allegro non troppo, where the symphony finds its real voice: squally, unsettled, harmonically restless in ways that feel genuinely disconcerting rather than merely dissonant for effect. Tension accumulates properly here, anger too, and the movement’s refusal of a clean resolution is the most interesting compositional decision on the whole disc.

Storgårds understands this repertoire from the inside. He’s been a persuasive advocate for the whole generation of Finnish composers who lived in Sibelius’s long shadow, Klami included, and the Helsinki Philharmonic responds with playing of real character: the brass has bite without turning coarse, the woodwind solos are shaped with personality rather than mere competence. Where this release stands against Arvo Volmer’s Ondine cycle from years back, or against Sakari Oramo’s earlier accounts, I’d give Storgårds the edge for sheer structural conviction. He seems to know exactly why each movement is shaped the way it is, even the baggy Andante.

Is Madetoja a great symphonist? No, not on this evidence, not quite. But he’s a real one, an honest one, and this disc argues his case about as persuasively as anyone has managed on record. Recommended, with enthusiasm tempered by honesty.