Of the four numbers that Sibelius supplied for the February 1898 Helsinki premiere of Adolf Paul’s historical drama King Christian II, two – the ‘Minuet’ and ‘The Fool’s Song’ – will already be familiar to aficionados from Petri Sakari’s likeable Iceland SO recording on Chandos (7/93), while the remaining movements (‘Elegy’ and ‘Musette’) eventually took their place in the five-movement concert suite alongside the ‘Nocturne’, ‘Serenade’ and ‘Ballade’ which the composer completed the same summer. The street music of the ‘Musette’ is simply delightful in its original garb without added strings, and in both the ‘Serenade’ and ‘Ballade’ (where we get a few extra bars of fugal writing prudently excised from the later version) Vanska uncovers strong thematic and stylistic links with the almost exactly contemporaneous First Symphony. I also very much like the defiant quality these fine artists bring to ‘The Fool’s Song’ (eloquently delivered by Raimo Laukka).
Music-making of refreshing perception and meticulous sensitivity similarly illuminates this first complete recording of Sibelius’s original incidental music for a 1905 production of Maeterlinck’s symbolist play (the venue was again Helsinki’s Swedish Theatre). There are ten numbers in all, only one of which (No. 9, track 19) didn’t make it into the concert suite. It was, however, unearthed by David Zinman and can be found on his 1979 Rotterdam PO recording (recently reissued on Philips Duo), where it precedes (and, misleadingly, shares a track with) ‘Death of Melisande’ (No. 10 in the theatre score). Sibelius left no tempo indication for this cue and it’s fascinating to compare Zinman’s restless, agitated manner with Vanska’s more introspective approach (the respective timings are 1'44'' and 3'01''). In the suite, Melisande’s song in No. 6 (‘Three blind sisters’) is, of course, heard in purely instrumental guise, and No. 5 (‘At the spinning wheel’) now follows No. 7 (‘Pastorale’). Otherwise, perhaps the most striking textual difference occurs at the close of No. 1 (the well-known ‘At the castle gate’), where the horns’ descending thirds are an octave lower than we are used to.
The performance of the Karelia Suite in its original scoring (which acts as a splendid curtain-raiser here) has been compiled from Vanska’s complete recording of the original Karelia music. Both outer movements have a real sense of pageantry about them (Vanska directs with exhilaratingly clean-limbed swagger), though I do share RL’s reservations about the Finn’s occasional predilection for ‘exaggerated and affected pianopianissimos’. Thus, at around 3'30'' in the central ‘Ballade’ (track 2), the dynamic level drops almost below the threshold of audibility and had me rushing to boost the volume control (Vanska repeats this trick twice in the King Christian II ‘Elegy’, and towards the end of the final number in Pelleas). For optimum results, therefore, playback needs to be higher than many listeners may think reasonable. That said, I must stress that the engineering is quite spectacularly truthful throughout and that here is indeed an unusually absorbing collection.'