Colin Davis opened the London Symphony Orchestra's new season with the mythic power of Sibelius's Kullervo Symphony, in a blistering performance with the men of the LSO Chorus. A monumental, ambitious work, it lasts nearly 80 minutes and tells the story of Kullervo, the Finnish folk hero, who has an incestuous tryst with his sister and then kills himself. Composed in 1892, when Sibelius was in his mid-20s, this vast score is a work of youthful exuberance (later in life, he almost burnt the manuscript in a fit of self-critical angst), yet it offers fascinating glimpses of the composer he could have become.
The piece began with two instrumental movements. The first was a gloomy introduction, full of forbidding modal melodies, but it was the second, a slow movement on Kullervo's Youth, that was most remarkable. The delicacy of Sibelius's string writing sounded as subtle and atmospheric as Debussy, and the continuous chromaticism of the piece looked forward to a much later expressionism, especially with the finesse and detail of the LSO's playing.
The third movement was the heart of the story: a vocal cantata driven by the raw energy of the LSO Chorus, with baritone Peter Mattei as Kullervo and mezzosoprano Monica Groop as his doomed sister. Davis whipped the orchestra and chorus into life as they told the story of Kullervo's sleigh-ride seduction of a mysterious woman. To an orchestral interlude of fiery passion, Kullervo at last consummates his feelings, but discovers that he has just slept with his sister.
Groop was heart-rending in her description of her abandonment as a child, and Sibelius's orchestration was fabulously imaginative, with a passage of shimmering woodwind trills depicting the sounds of the forest. Mattei's horrified response was equally powerful, accompanied by shattering dissonances in the orchestra.
Davis also conducted a searing performance of Pohjola's Daughter, a tone poem composed only 14 years after Kullervo but inhabiting another musical world. The piece compresses its mythological narrative into a quarter of an hour, distilling all the incident of the earlier symphony into music of vivid, concentrated power.
