If you want a great historical account of this work you could do infinitely worse than this one, which ranks in stature with that recorded by Robert Kajanus and the Helsinki Philharmonic, now available on Koch. Thor swings his hammer, and you feel cosmic forces at work in this music, something on which Sibelius himself commented when writing in 1914: “God opens the door for a moment and his orchestra is playing the Fifth Symphony.” Celibidache galvanizes the Swedish players in a reading of tremendous tensile strength, power, and vision. There are touching moments of breath-catching delicacy and purity in the central andante, while the finale is magnificently spacious. Celibidache lets the music unfold powerfully but slowly, so the architectural grandeur of the opening movement assumes vast and epic proportions. Gone is the slightly astringent and congested ambience of the earlier performance, and this account reveals the conductor’s best attributes. This is where Celibidache’s idiosyncrasies lose pulse and meaning, but this is infinitely better than Toscanini’s wildly theatrical 1940 recording with the NBC Symphony (Naxos).Ĭelibidache’s stereo recording of Symphony No. Interestingly, as George Szell proved with his famous Concertgebouw account on Philips, cumulative energy is less important in playing this work than mathematically precise, predictable gestures used to support the thematic linchpins of the piece. The finale is never as majestic and controlled as Bernstein’s with the New York Philharmonic, and hasn’t comparable excitement. The scherzo, however, alternates ominously between moods of violent passion and shimmering rapture and there are moments when you feel that Celibidache’s interpretation is being forged on the spot, and the performance almost loses its way.
The opening movement is powerfully sculpted, and the great brass climaxes are layered and terraced as you’d expect in a Bruckner work. It brings mind-boggling inconsistencies of view. 2, recorded at the Stockholm Konserthus in November 1965 (in mono sound), too special. Yet for all its idiosyncratic grandeur and intellectual severity, I can’t claim to find Celibidache’s live recording of Sibelius’ Symphony No. Love him or loathe him, Celibidache is one of those pivotal figures who left his own indelible imprint on the musical consciousness of the late 20th century. It makes conductors do this kind of thing:įew do it justice better than Leonard Bernstein - performing in Croydon’s Fairfield Hall, of all places.Deutsche Grammophon’s ongoing Celibidache Edition now brings a batch of previously unreleased material drawn from the concert archives of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
It’s theatrical, it’s tense, it’s triumphant. It basically gives the stick-waggler carte blanche to swagger through the ending like a total god.
While we’re on the subject of horns…īy separating the final six chords of this movement, and the whole symphony, Sibelius created one of the finest ‘conductor moments’ in classical music. Like, how did he even get that from those swans? And he naturally went for the horn rather than the oboe? He’s a genius. But this is how Sibelius interpreted it, in these horn chords:
So in our heads and probably yours, there’s not a huge amount of symphonic potential there. So, Sibelius wanted to convey the majestic call of the whooper swan for one of the movement’s main themes.
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