As more and more neglected and unpublished Sibelius is being exhumed, notably by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Osmo Vanska, the time is indeed ripe for this survey of the complete choral songs. The venture is important – and irresistible – not only for its consistently fine performances, but for the historical context it provides for a deeper understanding of both Sibelius and his later contemporaries.
The two-disc set begins where – in the mythology of Finnish oral tradition – all music began: with the life-giving song of Vainamoinen from the Kalevala’s compilation of folk poetry. “It is all music, a theme and variations”, declared Sibelius; and the verse which tuned Sibelius’s ear to the musicality of the Finnish language (at a time when he and his social class still spoke Swedish) also inspired his first distinctive song settings. Here, excellent production most sensitively captures the division and shifting of the finely blended voices of the Tapiola Chamber Choir, as solo and ensemble voices trace the asymmetrical metres and modal cadences of works such as The Boat Journey (“Venematka”) from Op. 18 and The Lover (“Rakastava”).
The role of the Kalevala in particular and of music and song festivals in general in Finland’s struggle for independence as the century turned cannot be overestimated. References to the Kalevala return in the group of songs for ceremonies and festivities in which solo exhortations are pitted against shifting choral harmonies, as images of journey, hope and freedom are expressed in the supple melodies of ten songs for a university degree ceremony from 1897 (Op. 23).
A fervent and optimistic tribute to Finland’s great national romantic painter Albert Edelfelt sets works by Sibelius’s beloved Swedish-language poet, Runeberg: and his Autumn Evening (“Hostkvallen”) could be an aural re-creation of one of the painter’s own canvases. Sibelius’s music pierces dark, close harmonies with high lines of anguish, presaging the imaginative virtuosity of later masterpieces such as Men from Plain and Sea and Dreams, with their sense of the wandering and yearning of the human spirit reflected in the ebb and flow of tonality and texture.
The second disc follows three simple Christmas carols with the composer’s sacred and liturgical pieces. Among these early prentice works, the bells of Helsinki’s great Kallio Church ring out: the peal which Sibelius wrote for the fine 1912 Nordic Jugendstil building still rings out twice a day, and here we are treated to the words as well. The songs for children range from distinctly uninspired English-language commissions for American schools, to a tiny and perfect setting of The Landscape Breathes, in which the girls’ voices slowly and chromatically thaw from their unison freeze.
Finland’s and Sibelius’s unique species of unjingoistic patriotism returns at the end with gently yet distinctively harmonized hymns to specific regions of the motherland and, finally and inevitably, with the great Finlandia hymn.'