Robert Kajanus died in 1933, just three years after these recordings were made, and the fact that Sibelius himself handpicked his oldest friend and most faithful interpreter to conduct this London project tells you something essential about what you’re hearing. Not a museum piece. A living testament.
The Sibelius Society recordings — issued on 78s beginning in 1930, now transferred with admirable care by Mark Obert-Thorn for Naxos — represent something that later conductors, however gifted, simply cannot replicate: the composer’s own sonic imagination, filtered through a man who had known that imagination since the two of them were young and restless in Helsinki in the 1880s. Sibelius was unambiguous about it. Kajanus, he said, had gone deeper and given his music more feeling and beauty than anyone. You believe it when you listen.
Obert-Thorn’s transfers deserve a word of their own. He worked from original 78s — in some cases assembling the best results from four separate sets — and his digital tools now allow him a finesse simply unavailable when he did earlier transfers of this same material for Koch International in the early 1990s. The difference, by his own account, is substantial: better de-clicking, less filtering, more air in the sound. The surface noise that remains is of the period, not intrusive, and the orchestral textures — particularly the strings — come through with surprising warmth.
Now to the music itself.
The Belshazzar’s Feast suite, op. 51, opens the program, and Kajanus finds exactly the right atmosphere: something gauzy, slightly unreal, the “Oriental Procession” glinting with an exoticism that never tips into caricature. Sibelius was never entirely comfortable with the orientalist idiom — this was incidental music, after all, written for Hjalmar Procopé’s play — but Kajanus makes “Solitude” genuinely ache, and “Night Music” dissolves into the dark with a naturalness that more self-conscious interpreters have never quite matched. The suite is minor Sibelius by any measure, but minor Sibelius conducted this way becomes something worth attending to.
The Karelia Suite follows, though Kajanus includes only the Intermezzo and Alla marcia — no Ballade. Why? The source materials offer no explanation, and one is left to speculate: time constraints of the 78-rpm format, perhaps, or some contractual particularity of the session. The omission is odd but not crippling. What Kajanus gives you in the two movements he does conduct is brisk, unaffected momentum — none of the bombast that afflicts lesser performances of the Alla marcia, just clean rhythmic energy.
The Symphony no. 2 in d major is the centerpiece, and here Kajanus pushes — that’s the right word. The first movement moves fast, almost breathlessly so, and the finale is whirled rather than built. Some listeners will find this exhilarating; others may feel the architecture slightly blurred. I lean toward the former reaction, at least provisionally. This is not Paavo Berglund’s scrupulous structuralism or Colin Davis’s burnished expansiveness. It’s something rawer and more urgent — possibly closer to what the symphony sounded like when it was new, when its nationalism felt dangerous rather than decorative.
The program notes by Colin Anderson are exactly what liner notes should be: informative without being pedantic. Obert-Thorn’s own technical essay is a model of lucidity about what restoration work actually involves — genuinely useful, not self-congratulatory.
This is Sibelius from the source. Whatever its sonic limitations, nothing else gives you that.
