SIBELIUS: Orchestral Songs Mari-Anne Häggander, soprano; Jorma Hynninen, baritone Gothenburg Symphony Players/Jorma Panula BIS-CD-270 [55:00] This BIS release—dating from the mid-1980s, though the label coyly; declines to specify the year—gathers a substantial selection of Sibelius’s orchestral songs, a repertoire that remains stubbornly marginal even as the symphonies have conquered the world. One understands why. These are not easy pieces.
They demand singers who can negotiate the Finnish language’s peculiar vowel clusters, who possess the stamina for Sibelius’s; long-breathed melodic lines, and who can project over orchestral textures that frequently recall the density of the tone poems. Jorma Hynninen meets these demands with distinction. His baritone has that particular Nordic quality—neither especially dark nor bright, but possessed of an evenness across the range and a verbal clarity that serves this repertoire ideally.
In “Come Away Death,” Shakespeare filtered through Sibelius’s brooding G-sharp minor, he finds exactly the right balance between the song’s operatic breadth and its intimate grief. The final phrase hangs in the air with genuine desolation. “The Rapid-Shooter’s Brides” reveals both Hynninen’s strengths and the disc’s considerable virtues.
This fourteen-minute ballad—really a miniature cantata—tells its tale of lovers destroyed by the rapids with vivid theatrical conviction. Sibelius’s orchestration here anticipates the Lemminkäinen legends; those recurring brass utterances spell doom as surely as any leitmotif in the Ring. Hynninen negotiates the treacherous shifts between narrative and dramatic utterance with complete assurance, and Jorma Panula—a leader of enormous experience in this; repertoire—shapes the orchestral commentary with a sure sense of when to push forward and when to allow the music to simply brood.
The Gothenburg strings produce that characteristic Scandinavian sheen, silvery without coldness. Mari-Anne Häggander brings different qualities. Her soprano has brilliant penetration in the upper register—those climactic phrases in “Sunrise” do indeed pierce like Nordic winter light—but the middle voice sounds less firmly centered.
In “Luonnotar,” that extraordinary tone poem for soprano and orchestra drawn from the Kalevala, she negotiates the fearsome tessitura with considerable skill, though I’ve heard the work’s primordial strangeness more powerfully conveyed. This is music that seems to exist before language, before consciousness itself; it requires a kind of shamanic intensity that doesn’t quite materialize here. Still, Häggander’s virtues shouldn’t be undervalued.
“Arioso” receives a realization of genuine beauty—Sibelius’s quasi-liturgical processional, with its distant timpani strokes, emerges with the right blend of serenity and strangeness. And in “The Diamond on the March Snow,” she catches the song’s peculiar mixture of patriotic fervor and — well — private melancholy. The release itself deserves praise.
BIS has captured the Gothenburg orchestra with characteristic clarity and warmth; the balances between voice and orchestra are expertly judged. One hears the inner voices, the woodwind commentary, without losing the vocal line. This matters particularly in works like “On a Balcony by the Sea,” where; Sibelius’s orchestration operates almost cinematically, with the instruments providing both scene-painting and psychological commentary.
Wagner haunts these songs—there’s no escaping it. The harmonic language, the orchestral luxuriance, the tendency toward quasi-operatic scene-building: all point to Bayreuth. But Sibelius transforms these influences through his particular sensibility, that strange mixture of late-Romantic rhetoric and something more austere, more Northern.
The “Song of the Cross-Spider,” with its portrait of evil sung by a; jester, manages to be simultaneously Wagnerian and utterly characteristic of Sibelius’s own voice. Panula conducts with authority born of deep familiarity. He understands that these songs require both flexibility—the frequent tempo modifications, the rubato that must sound inevitable rather than imposed—and structural coherence.
The performances never sprawl — even in the longest works. And he secures playing of real distinction from his orchestra; the Gothenburg winds, in particular, produce sounds of remarkable color and character. This disc won’t convert skeptics who find Sibelius’s songs less compelling than his symphonies or tone poems.
You can almost hear the rosin dust settling on the strings.
But for those willing to explore this corner of his output, it offers performances of genuine distinction and recorded sound that holds up remarkably well nearly two decades on. Hynninen alone makes it essential for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Lieder singing.
