SIBELIUS Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5
London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin Davis
RCA Red Seal 74321 68017 2 [70:34]
There’s something odd happening in this recording—something that kept nagging at me through both hearings, through the undeniable grandeur of Davis’s conception, through the LSO’s plush sonority. It took me back to an Edinburgh winter circa 1970, standing in the Usher Hall while Alexander Gibson rehearsed this same Fifth Symphony with the Scottish National Company, the brass raw in places, the strings sometimes scraggly, but the whole thing alive with a kind of nervous energy that made the music feel necessary, even urgent.
Davis’s approach couldn’t be more different. Everything here breathes. And swells.
And breathes some more. His strings don’t so much attack notes as allow them to emerge, gradually, like something organic pushing up through soil. Brass chords are given time to “speak”—which they do, comfortably, about a second after you expect them.
The timpani (beautifully recorded, one must say) consistently arrive a hair’s breadth behind the beat, not through incompetence but through what seems deliberate instruction. Even the woodwinds, those forthright creatures, often enter with a soft aspirate rather than clean articulation. Now I don’t doubt Davis intends all this—it’s clearly part of a vision of — Sibelius as something that wells up naturally, music that grows rather than being constructed.
And there are moments when it works magnificently. The development section of the First Symphony’s "finale" has a genuine sense of organic unfolding, themes emerging from the texture rather than being imposed upon it. The great horn calls in the Fifth have real majesty, and the way the strings cushion them suggests vast northern spaces.
But. That swelling attack, that constant oozing into notes rather than striking them cleanly—after forty minutes it begins to feel less like interpretation and more like mannerism. The “swan” theme in the Fifth’s "finale" comes off too brisk, as if Davis suddenly remembered he needed to inject some forward motion, and at the work’s culmination those massive brass chords dissolve into generalized noise, the melodic lines obscured in the welter of sound.
More troubling: the First Symphony’s "scherzo" — which should have demonic energy, feels oddly comfortable, the rhythmic bite softened by all that gradual swelling. I pulled out Gibson’s old CFP recording—rough around the edges — certainly, the SNO no match for the LSO’s corporate sheen. Yet within thirty seconds I felt I was being guided somewhere, that events were happening when and where they needed to happen, not a split second afterward.
Gibson’s Fifth unfolds just as naturally as Davis’s but with a stronger current beneath it, a sense of necessity that makes even the quiet moments feel charged. When he reaches the “swan” theme he does broaden slightly, just enough to suggest wonder without losing momentum—it’s masterly, really. The album quality here is superb throughout, no question.
RCA has captured the LSO in fine form — the bass particularly solid, the hall ambience generous without being soupy. For those who find Gibson’s recordings too hard-driven, too lacking in “poetry” (as one prominent critic insisted for years, though he never quite specified where), this Davis will seem like the answer to a prayer. It’s grand, it’s authoritative, it’s beautifully played.
But I kept thinking of those electronic keyboards one encounters at provincial rehearsals, the ones with the “strings” setting that swells gradually to maximum volume about three seconds after you’ve pressed the key. They call it a “string cushion.” Some people apparently like mushy strings the way others like mushy peas, and this is a free country—I wouldn’t dream of depriving anyone of something that makes them happy. Still, when Sibelius marked an accent, I rather think he meant it to arrive on the beat.
Perhaps I’m just out of step with current fashion. Perhaps the greenhouse effect has made even Sibelius’s frozen northern landscapes a bit soggy underfoot. But I can’t help feeling that somewhere between the fierce engagement of Davis’s youth and the majestic non-intervention documented here, something vital has been mislaid.
Handsomely packaged, impeccably played, conceptually coherent—and ultimately, for this listener at least, curiously unsatisfying. Christopher Howell
