Founded in 1927, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra only achieved its international reputation with the appointment of Jukka-Pekka Saraste as music director 14 years ago. Since then, they have become hugely popular in the UK, though this oddly uneven concert didn't find them at their best until it reached its second half.
Before the interval, Saraste and pianist Imogen Cooper proved a less than ideal combination in Beethoven's First Piano Concerto, with Cooper's intellectual rigour squaring uneasily with Saraste's poetic elegance. Mozart's concert aria Ch'io Mi Scordi di Te was similarly unengaging, with the usually exemplary soprano Soile Isokoski singing with curiously chilly detachment.
But then Saraste and his orchestra turned to two major scores by Sibelius, and the mood changed. Luonnotar and the Four Lemminkainen Legends, though written years apart, are both metaphysical works based on the Kalevala (a Finnish epic), and essentially complementary. Luonnotar, for soprano and orchestra, describes the separation of sky from water during the creation of the universe. The hero Lemminkainen, meanwhile, sets out to destroy death by travelling to the river Tuonela in a futile attempt to kill the famous swan that floats on its waters and lulls the dying to rest with its singing.
Both works are characterised by a restless ambivalence, which Saraste probed with sinewy virtuosity. The oddly joyless, near-atonal rustling with which Sibelius describes the birth pangs of existence in Luonnotar generated mystery and profound unease, while Isokoski, striking form, negotiated the hieratic vocal line with a beauty of tone that seemed to border on the supernatural.
In the Lemminkainen Legends, Sibelius's debt to Wagner is more apparent. Echoes of the Venusberg orgies from Tannhäuser swirled through the depiction of the hero's promiscuous early life. The swan's song, at once seductive and baleful, suggested the death-haunted world of Tristan und Isolde.
The Legends remain controversial, however. Sibelius, doubting their quality, suppressed parts of the score until late in life. In the hands of an inadequate conductor, the full set can still prove unwieldy. Here, however, they held the audience in their grip from start to finish and seemed to contain not a single superfluous note.
