... Deceiving ...
_H.AlexCab_ | Americas | 05/09/2006
(1 out of 5 stars)
"Unfortunately, I too cannot recommend this record : it contains a performance close to platitude, a deceiving approach to a fine early work now represented in the catalog by such [examplary] names like Berglund, Segerstam, Vanska or Saraste. Despite some superb singing efforts by distinguished soloists and also by the choruses who sometimes have their moments, the end result leaves something to be desired. I totally agree with the other review and can't figure out how some reviewers or magazines have come to overestimate this disc. Even the Panula-Naxos is preferable.
"
Don't waste your time (and money)
L. Ackerman | Ashburn, VA (USA) | 05/31/2006
(1 out of 5 stars)
"Why should anyone invest their money on a Kullervo that sounds dull? Actually, why should anyone release a Kullervo that does not offer gorgeous sound and terrific conducting? Another one: why should any conductor record a piece twice if it is not going to be a significant improvement? Here you have it.
You can put forth all the fancy marketing you want: Hybrid-SACD, Multichannel... fancy cover... but if the recording venue sucks, nothing will save it. The truth is that the Barbican Hall is a horrible venue for orchestral recordings, and nothing will change that. No recording from the LSO harvest has confirmed otherwise. The Barbican Hall is just terrible: there is no bloom, no warmth, no range, no perspective. Everything is blended. Perhaps some pieces might take the punishment, but others cannot survive without those sound qualities. Kullervo is one of them. Go look for the first Berglund on EMI (analogue!), or those wonderful BIS recordings. This? AVOID!
I just wished the LSO would move to the Royal Albert Hall and record there. Meanwhile, we have all these missed opportunities, which will likely end up in Amazon selling at $0.50 or so a piece."
YOUNG MAN'S DOOM
DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 05/14/2006
(4 out of 5 stars)
"This issue is from this very year 2006, the year in which that celebrated exponent of Sibelius Sir Colin Davis attains his 79th birthday. Sibelius himself was 26 when he wrote Kullervo, so this is an elderly man's interpretation of a young man's music. However I don't think the matter is just as simple as that. Nor is it made any simpler by the way in which the musical columns of the British press drizzle down on Davis that punctual and undiscriminating praise that descends from them like the gentle rain from heaven on whoever is deemed fashionable.
Davis's Sibelius, even at its best, has always seemed to me to rank just a point or two short of the true greatness that I associate with, say, Kajanus or Beecham. However I never yet heard a bad performance from him either, and I don't think this Kullervo is the first. It's more a matter of what we are expecting to get out of the music. It seems to me that thrills in the manner of Tchaikovsky were never Sibelius's style at any stage of his career, even in straightforward early compositions like En Saga or the Karelia suite or in a crowd-pleaser (admittedly a good one) like Lemminkainen's Return. The completely individual brooding quality of the later masterpieces can be heard sporadically in the earlier works too. I don't hear much of it in, say, the first symphony, but I seem to hear it surprisingly strongly in Kullervo written right at the outset of his career, and I wonder whether that was exactly what led him to preserve it unpublished despite the many reservations he felt about it from the start. It comes across to me in a slightly odd way - I hear in Kullervo, as the liner-note writer does, quite a strong influence of Bruckner. In all of Sibelius's later music that I can think of the style of Bruckner is as much an absentee as is the style of Brahms, and here in Kullervo the passages that most recall Bruckner tend to associate themselves most with the presages of late Sibelius that took a good many years to reappear.
So my own hunch is that this is the side of Kullervo that fascinated Davis. It's certainly the aspect of it that he presents strongly to my own ears. My feeling is also that an overly dramatic reading of Kullervo brings out its rawness and lack of sophistication. The whole format of the work is outstandingly undramatic for one thing. There are two longish instrumental movements to start with, then the male chorus put in an appearance together with the two soloists, all to music of the very simplest kind without repetition of words. The orchestral element itself is my idea of `absolute' music rather being than of an illustrative or narrative variety, and I can't really see how one could make much of a drama out of it. I find the strength of this music to be in its inward and reflective aspects, inconsistent and slightly incoherent as it may be in certain ways.
That is my take on the piece as a whole and on this particular interpretation. I wasn't looking for excitement and consequently I didn't miss it. I was looking for depth and insight, and I seemed to find quite a lot of that. The chorus and the two soloists perform admirably in their untaxing roles, and the orchestra is after all the London Symphony. The recording is perfectly good, and the liner-note is adequate if hardly revelatory. The text is sung in the original Finnish with great clarity of enunciation by everyone, and the translation is in a gawky translationese that leads me to suspect it is probably pedantically accurate. The story has the real power that ancient sagas and ballads usually have for me - in this case the doom that attends violation, however accidental and unintended, of the timeless and near-universal taboo against incest. A young man's doom in the legend, but given sympathetic listening you may find that the young composer has not fared too badly at the hands of an interpreter with nearly four score years of life's lessons behind him."
