It's important to me to make note of how very good was the Sydney Symphony's Kullervo, with Vladimir Ashkenazy seemingly at one with the work. Three weeks have rushed by since we went, yet I think about it a lot.
It will be broadcast on Thursday 14 March 1300 (Australian Eastern summer time) a time slot which seems rather obtuse, and certainly not that accessible for the working man. It's a recording I can just hope makes it to the CD stage.
The first half of the programme was the Ravel's Left Hand Concerto with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet which was rather as epxected - not exactly Ashkanzy's natural home and played with considerable physicalness, which included leaving the stool and clutching the Steinway with the right hand to run the keyboard with his body as much as five fingers, by M. Bacouzet.
Kullervo is Opus 7. Sibelius was 26 when it premiered in 1892 with a scratch orchestra in a Finland now annexed to Russia having been sectioned off from the Swedish Kingdom earlier in the 19th Century. Reactions were mixed. There was sneering, there was uncertainty, there were reservations, there were cries of treachery for the use of the Finnish language (for a very Finnish legend mind you) as Sibelius gave first notice of the nationalism which would be his hallmark, and then there was the laurel wreath presented to Sibelius by his friend, the conductor Robert Kajanus, and on which were inscribed the final lines of the Kalevala on which Kullervo is based:
"This way therefore leads the pathway,
Here the path lies newly opened ..."
It is a huge work, an 80 minute oratorio / tone poem of substantial incubation.
It was, to cut to the chase, a simply maginficent performance for little ol' me, hearing it live for the first time (the previous outing in Sydney was in the 70s) and pretty worked up about it too I was. Everything was right. Ashkenazy is so well connected with this composer, the orchestra responded wonderfully to his every insight, and the all male choir was in fantastic form (in Finnish what's more) under acting music director Elizabeth Scott - take a big bow boys and girl. And then there was the supreme gift, thank you Mr Ashkenzy (for not much longer can we call you 'Our Vlad', as we tend to informalise those we love most) - two Finnish soloists in the absolutely splendid form of Helena Juntunen and Ville Rusanen.
Helena Juntunen and Ville Rusanen. You can hear them on March 14 if you're not down the mines like I will be.
Ashkenazy played it very darkly, which is what it is for sure. After the hauntingly restrained first two movements - a mysterious flight of ideas of youth (composer and hero/anti-hero) from which would emerge the shocking story of lost childhoods, lust and incest, guilt, self-condemnation and suicide - came the tragedy. And Ashkenazy played it very darkly.
The chorus, a Greek chorus of dark knowing tragedy, from entry to the final "and so he perished", was relentlessly good, these men in black getting around the language as if their own, with a beautiful sombre tone replete with doom. The steady swaying funeral beat was hypnotic. You could only yield to it and go with it, swept into the darkness, as did they.
Now, Helena Juntunen simply stunned me. Her confident presence told all. She had its measure. In a equally astonishing display of vocal development, rather the reverse of her brother's, she devolved from a fiesty object of seduction, initially wildly rejecting with spitting conviction the sleigh man in those woods, into a soft hued girl, with lilting beauty of such sweetness as to break your heart, and a soft grained tremolo like a maiden's curls, as the winds rippled behind her, as she recalled her childhood and the realisation of the horror of the self alone, such that she wished herself dead.
If only I get to hear this again; then again, revisiting such specialness doesn't always work.
For the record, your blogger visiting Ainola (2009)
