Sibelius Symphonies 2 and 3 – Maazel Vienna Philharmonic

Maazel’s Sibelius: The Vienna Paradox

There’s something inherently improbable—and rather thrilling—about the Vienna Philharmonic playing Sibelius. These are musicians steeped in Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler; their corporate sound is all warmth and glow, those famous strings like burnished copper. Nordic granite and ice? Not exactly their natural habitat.

Yet Decca’s gamble in the 1960s, pairing Lorin Maazel with the VPO for a complete Sibelius cycle, paid off handsomely. Here we have two of the seven symphonies—the Second and Third—reissued on Eloquence at super-budget price, and they make a compelling case for what initially seems like miscasting. Maazel was then in his thirties, already a formidable technician, and he drives these performances with a kind of heated intensity that has little to do with Finnish melancholy and everything to do with late-Romantic drama.

The Symphony No. 2, recorded in 1964 at the Sofiensaal, emerges as a frankly Tchaikovskian affair. Maazel doesn’t apologize for the work’s emotional extravagance—he embraces it. That famous finale, which can so easily turn bombastic, here surges forward with real conviction, the VPO’s brass section (those glorious horns) delivering the big tune with unabashed fervor. The opening of the last movement announces itself with an accentuated grunt, almost a bark—Maazel wants you to sit up and pay attention. Detail flits past: inner string lines emerge with unusual clarity, woodwind interjections have real personality. This is Sibelius seen through a Viennese lens, which means a certain opulence of sound, a richness of texture that some purists might find too comfortable.

The analogue disc has held up reasonably well, though there’s a low wash of hiss—nothing disabling, just a reminder that we’re dealing with technology now six decades old. The strings at forte and above don’t quite have the lustre I remember from the original LPs; time has taken its toll. But the stereo separation remains satisfying, and if you listen with a score (always advisable), you’ll appreciate how much Maazel reveals in the orchestration.

Where the Second is all storm and stress, the Third—recorded four years later—finds Maazel emphasizing not the chamber-music intimacy that some conductors favor but rather the work’s vestigial Romanticism. This is Sibelius at the crossroads, moving away from his Russian nationalist phase toward something more austere, more classical. Maazel seems more interested in the backward glance than the forward leap. The “Andantino con moto” spins along a touch too briskly for my taste—it needs more space to breathe—but doubts evaporate in the finale’s “Moderato—Allegro ma non tanto,” where the temperature climbs steadily. Listen to those horn breakers at 7:43, rolling through with amber-golden gruffness. That’s the VPO at its best.

How does this measure up against the competition? Barbirolli’s roughly contemporary Second with the Royal Philharmonic (the Chesky issue, not the earlier Hallé version for EMI) offers more warmth, more explicit emotion. Maazel is cooler, more objective—though “cool” is relative when dealing with a director who injects this much adrenalin into the proceedings. The Anthony Collins mono recordings from the 1950s, if you can still find the Beulah transfers, remain remarkable for their structural clarity and Nordic authenticity. Maazel and the VPO offer something different: cosmopolitan Sibelius, if you will.

The gap between the two symphonies on this disc is substantial—a full minute of silence. Someone at Eloquence was thinking. It gives you time to reset, to prepare for the shift in aesthetic from the Second’s extroversion to the Third’s more ambiguous character.

This isn’t desert-island Sibelius—for that I’d probably reach for Colin Davis or, in the Third, the lean severity of Karajan’s 1960s Berlin recording. But Maazel’s cycle, now available at bargain price, deserves serious consideration. These are vivid, detailed, exciting performances that make a persuasive case for an interpretive approach some might consider heretical. The VPO plays with commitment and considerable beauty of tone. And Maazel, for all his calculated effects, never loses sight of the music’s architecture.

If you’re building a Sibelius library, you’ll want multiple versions of these symphonies anyway—they’re endlessly rewarding works that reveal different facets under different hands. At this price, the Maazel is well worth having as a counterweight to more austere, more “authentic” approaches. Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to show you what you’ve been missing.

ELOQUENCE (DECCA) 461 321–2 [69:42]