Sibelius Edition 7: Songs
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Edition: Music CDAudio: English (Unknown)
Format: Import
CD Release Date: 2009-01-27
Music Label: Bis
Music reviews of Sibelius Edition 7: Songs
Music Review: Sibelius completists will be delighted, but for others it's probably overkill
Rating: 3 Stars
Bis's laudable effort to commit to digital sound every scrap of paper on which Sibelius wrote little black dots continues with this Volume devoted to songs for solo voice and piano. This genre was once a staple of middle- and upper-class drawing rooms, as evinced by the copious output at the hands of composers from Haydn through the late Romantics (and even the occasional modernist like Ives). The bulk of Sibelius's works in this form exemplify the kind of salon piece that he produced throughout his career for the amateur music market that was still economically viable in the years before phonographs and digital audio turned music making and consumption on its head.
Whereas Sibelius's choral music and orchestral songs emphasize Finnish texts, usually drawn from national history or mythology, his voice and piano songs are mainly settings of Swedish texts. Finnish is in second place followed by a smattering of texts in German, French and even English. In place of the sublime or oddly neo-primal Nordic characters and milieus of ancient legendry, these songs tend to concern themselves with more hackneyed imagery. There is an abundance of forest scenes, changes of seasons, swans and various other clichés of romantic poetry, and many of the texts display a tendency toward sentimentalism (though I must confess to being illiterate in Swedish and Finnish, so perhaps I'm a victim of poor translations). Trite lyrics don't forestall a full dose of Sibelian angst and tension though, and the effect is often overwrought. By contrast, Grieg's many songs flow more naturally from his simple lyrical idiom, representing a more essential aspect of that composer's oeuvre. I expect this is a big reason why Sibelius's songs have been relegated to the margins, at least outside Scandinavia, though other reasons include the obscurity of the languages, the lack of his characteristic orchestral timbres, and the perception that he simply didn't put as much into these little pieces as he put into his orchestral masterpieces. These latter two factors have served to largely bury his piano and chamber music too, with the exception of Voces Intimae.
The one set of Sibelius songs that is worthy of his orchestral output is Op. 38, which dates from 1904, the same period as the Violin Concerto. The first song, Höstkväll (Autumn evening), has a sparse piano part, which in one section consists of a tremolo on F# over which the soprano sings a highly chromatic line that frequently emphasizes B# (a tritone away). "På verandan vid havet" (On a balcony by the sea) continues the austerity: the piano part is often monophonic, and the voice is often left to its own rhetorical leaps to the top of the staff with only a decaying chord for accompaniment. "I natten" (In the night) is a beautiful nocturne that features a raised Lydian fourth (the leading tone of the dominant), a Sibelian fingerprint that you hear in the later "Song of the Roses" (Op. 50/6), not to mention more famous works like The Harvesters from The Tempest, the Fourth Symphony (e.g., the oboe melody at the start of the second movement, or the finale's tritone-based main theme), and many others. The next song, the fourth straight Rydberg setting of the lot, is a more conventional affair with arpeggiated chords imitating a harp. The last song, a setting of a bizarrely orientalist text from Gustaf Fröding called "I wish I was in India", is less interesting. This set strikes me as posing difficulties for amateur musicians (the first song is in six sharps, for example), so perhaps Sibelius was putting more individualism into these works.
Among the other songs, not all is bleakness though. Despite the uneven quality of the texts and the generally simple strophic forms, there are many beautiful melodies, and some inventive moments. One of my favorites is "Demanten på marssnön" (Op. 36/6), with a poignant leap up to and down from high F. The chords of "Lasse liten" (Op. 37/2), alternating between I and ii ½ dim 7, remind me of the opening of the Swanwhite suite. A curiosity is "Les trois soeurs aveugles" (The three blind sisters), a rare setting of a French text, in this case from Pélleas et Mélisande. You'll recognize the melody from the incidental music. Sibelius spent time in Paris as a student, and spoke serviceable, though not fluent, French. Next up in the parade of languages are the Op. 50 songs in German, a language that Sibelius spoke quite well. "Die stille Stadt" (The silent city) stands out for its sparse, soft accompaniment of piano arpeggios, voiced "violin style" in fifths and sixths, rather than thirds. Teodora, from Op. 35, depicts a man's lustful desire for a Turandot-like Asian femme fatale. The accompaniment is exclusively low-register, rapid chromatic "growls": chromatic scales within a narrow compass, separated by silences. Its performance is by baritone Gabriel Suovanen, a welcome change of pace since most of the songs herein are rendered by female singers.
You'll note that sparse piano writing is a recurring theme in Sibelius's songs. "Lapping waters", Op. 61/2 is another example of this, with a chromatic scalar pattern (onomatopoeic in this case) as the voice's bare accompaniment. "Idle wishes" from the same set is similar. The accompaniment to Op. 72/4 ("The echo nymph") is sparse almost to the point of being protominimalist, basically confined to a single octave in the treble register. It reminds me of Ives's Serenity, though obviously without the latter's harmonic invention. This is the kind of piece that's technically easy, but can sound terrible in the hands of inferior performers (any good piece of music is hard to play).
Pedal points are ubiquitous in Sibelius, but they're usually on the bottom, not the top as is the case in Op. 72/6 ("The hundred ways"). The Jewish girl's song "Solitude", adapted from the incidental music to Belshazzar's Feast, is another minimalistic sounding one, the piano part featuring a simple right-hand ostinato in broken eighth notes where the lower note alternates between F and G while the upper one stays on F an octave higher.
"Älven och snigeln" (The River and the Snail) from Op. 57 has a varied accompaniment, starting with bell-like chords over reversing scales in parallel motion, then going to a kind of chromatic running accompaniment that become diatonic and sounds almost like a piano exercise before accelerating and going in another direction: a typical Sibelius kind of stroke. After a passage for solo voice, the piano returns for a more declamatory ending punctuated by a more clichéd choral accompaniment. Given the musical dramatics, it's surprising that the text by the painter and poet Ernst Josephson has to do with a snail. "The mill wheel" from this same set starts out very similarly to the gopek that concludes the Op. 12 piano sonata.
The cantata Luonnotar is represented in its piano and voice reduction, though since the orchestral version is so dependent on astringent passages with sustained strings punctuated by harp, this is one of the less compelling Sibelius reductions, probably intended solely for rehearsal purposes. It's probably one of the most difficult works in the album though, definitely requiring the services of a "real" soprano (among other things, the range is from B3 to B5). The fifth CD in the album is devoted to sketches and alternate versions of the songs on the first four CDs. The most curious of these are the two songs for Twelfth Night in a version for voice and guitar.
I've said little about the performances thus far, partly because I wanted to focus on the music itself, which is not well known, and partly because I hold something of a prejudice against the coupling of the classical/operatic vocal style and a lone piano, a combination that I find overdone and at the expense of diction and subtlety. But I'm something of a gadfly on that topic, and if that's not your concern then I expect you'll be satisfied with these interpreters. Pianist Folke Gräsbeck, is solid, and except for mezzo-soprano Monica Group (who gets wobbly in the upper register), the singers are admirably accurate with pitch. Granted, most of this music is not the most challenging in the world for professional musicians.
So is this music worth a five-hour investment for those who aren't committed Sibelians? Perhaps not. The gems are there, but you can sample them more judiciously on other, single CD, albums. The most devoted of us will enjoy working through these pieces, but with a few exceptions they don't represent Sibelius at the height of his inspiration and prowess.
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