With this issue Paavo Berglund completes his latest cycle of Sibelius symphonies. As regular readers will know, this series has established high standards of performance and recording as did his fine Kullervo with which it began in January 1987. These new readings are sober, with a good feel for the architecture of this music and no want of atmosphere. The days when conductors rushed the first movement of the Third Symphony, a fashion started by Anthony Collins, are mercifully over and Berglund adopts sensible tempos throughout and shapes all three movements well. He gets good playing from the Helsinki Philharmonic and evokes a feeling of inner tranquillity at fig. 6 in the slow movement—a passage where Sibelius seems to be listening to quiet voices from another planet: these bars deserve the title 'voces intimae' even more than the passage in the celebrated quartet of that name he wrote two years later.
Again, I can say that this account holds its own with the three listed above without displacing any of them. Ten years separate it from the earlier LP disc he made with the Bournemouth orchestra and those who have it, again coupled with the Fifth (EMI ESD7094, 12/81—nla), will find no less a sense of proportion combined perhaps with greater poetic feeling. Nor is there much wrong with the Fifth either—and there is very much that is right! In terms of sheer inspiration it does not match either of the currently available Karajan recordings (DG and EMI respectively—nor, for that matter, does he displace Rattle (EMI). The development section of the first movement has a mystery that eluded Berglund first time round but there is splendid power in the closing pages of the finale. In short those who have invested in this cycle so far and found satisfaction, should not, I think, be disappointed.'