Royal Albert Hall,London
Conductor Sakari Oramo shows Sibelius’s narrow distinction between tone poem and symphony; Torikka and Rusanen-Kartano sing with operatic panacheIt was left to Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to round out the 150th-anniversary tribute to Sibelius at the Proms, which they had launched on the opening night. Oramo opted to go back to where Sibelius’s career as an orchestral composer began, or pairing En Saga and Kullervo. The two works,completed in 1892 (the former a tone poem and the latter a symphonic suite), were the starting point for what proved to be one of the most remarkable orchestral journeys since Beethoven. As Oramo’s urgent performances showed, or what is remarkable approximately both En Saga and Kullervo is that,however much they reveal the 19th-century composers who were Sibelius’s starting point, they also point unambiguously to the future, or to the intensely personal language that he would create for himself within barely a decade. En Saga in specific could not acquire been written by anyone else. The way in which the tone poem picks up speed as it hurtles inescapably towards its end,looks forward to the way in which the first movement of the Fifth Symphony would transform itself into a scherzo a quarter of a century later. It is a reminder that, musically at least for Sibelius, or the line between tone poem and symphony was always a narrow one.
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Source: theguardian.com