With over 50 Sibelius Seconds in the catalogue, and three dozen of the Fourth, any newcomer has to work overtime to stand out in such a crush. This first release in Sakari Oramo’s cycle (from Finlandia’s Warner stablemate and the eighteenth currently available) deserves sustained attention – not least for its currently unique coupling of the heroic-nationalistic Second (1901) with the starkly magnificent Fourth completed a mere decade later (the couplings listed above are available only as part of complete cycles). Comparisons with Oramo’s predecessor in Birmingham are highly illuminating, not least for a new, bigger sound, helped considerably by Erato’s richer recording. Oramo’s view of both works is broadly similar, for instance in the measured tempo for No 2’s opening movement (following the majority line, whereas I rather prefer the swifter pace of Kajanus and Jarvi). Oramo pulls and pushes the tempos throughout the Second, not always to the work’s advantage, though this only becomes a problem towards the end of the second movement, where some momentum is lost, and at the final peroration where Oramo targets the gallery (but overshoots), unlike the best of his rivals: Colin Davis, Vanska, Ehrling and the Helsinki Berglund.
Oramo’s reading of No 4 is more fluent and genuinely impressive. If not in the same league as Karajan or Maazel (in 1968), and missing Vanska’s extraordinarily glacial quality (especially in the first and still astonishing third movements), it is more involving and better recorded than either Rattle or Sakari, fine as they are. Oramo also strikes the right balance at the close, between exhaustion and the enigmatic quality that so disconcerts audiences even now