Sibelius Symphony No. 2 – Elder

There is a particular sound the Hallé makes in Sibelius, and it goes back further than anyone now playing in the orchestra can remember — back to Hans Richter, who introduced the Second Symphony to England with this very ensemble in 1905 and who understood, better than most Central European conductors of his generation, that Sibelius was not Tchaikovsky in a fur hat. That lineage matters less as documentary trivia than as something audible: a kind of institutional memory in the string tone, dark at the bottom, a little astringent up high, that suits this repertoire the way certain violins suit certain rooms.

Sir Mark Elder’s account of the symphony begins almost too quietly for its own good. The opening string murmur, those repeated-note figures passed from cellos up through the choir, feels underplayed at first — I found myself checking the volume dial. But patience is rewarded. By the five-minute mark the music has begun to churn beneath the surface, and Elder reveals himself to have been husbanding his resources all along. The climax that follows, brass piled up with real weight and grain, has the craggy quality this score wants and too rarely gets from conductors who mistake Sibelius for a tone painter of pretty Nordic scenery.

The slow movement is where this performance earns its keep. Pizzicato basses and lean, dry bassoons open the movement with exactly the right sense of something ancient being remembered rather than narrated — this is music that Sibelius himself associated, in his more candid moments, with the Don Juan legend and with intimations of death, and Elder does not shy from its bleaker implications. The central climax builds with unusual patience; nothing is rushed toward, nothing arrives before its time. It glows, but darkly, the way embers do.

Elsewhere I have small reservations, and I state them without much conviction, because they may say more about my listening habits than about Elder’s musicianship. The scherzo has fine, nervous energy — those repeated woodwind pulses skittering along — but the trio, with its aching oboe tune, is stretched out further than I’d have chosen, and there’s a risk of the music going slack. It doesn’t, quite. And the finale’s peroration, that famous major-key apotheosis, is conceived on a scale so broad here that I wondered whether the effect — thrilling as it undoubtedly is — depends on the visceral charge of a concert hall rather than the more scrutinizing conditions of repeated home listening. Once is glorious. Twice, I found myself impatient for the tempo to move.

Still: this is a serious, considered Second, one that trusts the architecture Sibelius built rather than goosing it for easy climaxes, and it deserves a place in the conversation alongside Barbirolli’s old Hallé release — another orchestra-and-director pairing with this repertoire in its bones — and the more overtly dramatic Bernstein and Vänskä versions.

The two shorter works are, if anything, even more persuasive. Pohjola’s Daughter gets a reading of real character — the brooding cello line that opens it (Väinämöinen’s theme, though Sibelius characteristically hadn’t settled on the program before he’d written much of the music, a fact Stephen Johnson’s notes rightly make something of) is dark and unhurried, and the faster music that erupts from it has genuine bite, brass snarling without becoming coarse. The Oceanides, that strange, salt-washed tone poem Sibelius revised almost up to the moment of its Norfolk, Connecticut premiere in 1914, receives playing of real atmosphere.

Sound throughout is full-bodied without being overprocessed, the Hallé’s own label doing right by its band. Not a version to displace the classic accounts entirely, but one played with conviction and, in the slow movement especially, real insight.