This is welcome indeed: the first commercial recording of non-operatic repertoire from the world’s oldest orchestra for nearly 20 years (bar a Bruckner Symphony No 8 under Hartmut Haenchen in 2018) and in repertoire it could claim to own. Sibelius wrote his incidental music for The Tempest in 1925 for the Royal Danish Theatre and its orchestra – an orchestra he had himself conducted.

The personnel may have changed, but given the theatre’s enviable collection of priceless string instruments by the Italian masters, much of the equipment has not. These recordings are taken from a performance at the Copenhagen Opera House in 2021 in which the elusive realm Sibelius conjured up in Shakespeare’s service was heard with the single significant piece of orchestral music that followed it: Tapiola (not included here, alas). What we hear is – as far as known – the actual music played at the 1925 Copenhagen premiere, in the same order, with an appendix in the form of a second version of ‘Miranda is lulled into slumber’ (with a string rather than harmonium chassis).

The Royal Danish Orchestra is more calorific than the Lahti Symphony, which of course recorded the complete music under Osmo Vänskä and subsequently the suites under his successor Okko Kamu, the conductor here. Kamu maintains his sense of patience in the Overture, with its proto-spectral overtone chords. Here as everywhere, the performance could be described, unsurprisingly given the source, as more theatrical. It is captured with far more presence than both Lahti recordings, which can be both a plus and minus in this purposely elusive music.

A case in point is the hypnotic loop of the ‘Chorus of the Winds’, in which I marginally prefer Vänskä’s faraway Lahti chorus given the dramatic situation. In Copenhagen there’s a real advantage in hearing Hanne Fischer as Ariel singing in the original Danish (rather than Lilli Paasikivi’s Finnish) and up close. The effect in ‘Full fathom five’ (aka ‘Ariel’s Second Song’) is truly felt, as the orchestra gropes around in quasi-atonal darkness underneath her.

In fact, the more full-on sound picture allows listeners to get a better handle on the workings of music in which Sibelius can appear to be pushing towards the tonal no man’s land that we hear in the salvaged ‘late fragments’ – a new language he apparently couldn’t bring to full symphonic maturity. We can taste the straining arguments that might have been in ‘Ariel brings the foes to Prospero’. The orchestral grain there, as in ‘Ariel flies in’, reveals something of the Royal Danish Orchestra’s vintage sound culture.

Its string sound, particularly in the ‘Intermezzo: Alonso mourns’ and the appendix ‘Miranda is lulled into slumber’, with minimal vibrato, a delicious translucence and no lack of patience from Kamu, hints at Tapiola itself. Singing is good but again very much on the front foot, and there is buoyancy sometimes missing in Lahti, not least in ‘Dance of the Shapes’, where Vänskä’s clarinets are all but lost. As so often, the perfect recording might be said to be a combination of the two, especially where Vänskä draws a very Tempest-like mist over proceedings. Alas no texts and translations, but with fine notes from Valdemar Lønsted, this can only be recommended.