Sibelius - Luonnotar
Sibelius - Orchestral Songs
Soile Isokoski; Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra / Segerstam
Ondine ODE10805

Release date May 2006

There really isn’t anything quite like Luonnotar in the repertoire. Although it lasts less than ten minutes, its scale is massive, and its ideas and form are highly original. It was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival in 1913 – sadly the reaction of the burghers of Gloucester is not recorded, but most likely it was one of baffled astonishment. The soloist on that occasion was the Finnish dramatic soprano Aino Ackté, the first Covent Garden Salome. I mention this because the vocal writing in Luonnotar appears to demand a Wagnerian-scaled voice – Sibelius employs a large orchestra, although he rarely requires his full forces. Soile Isokoski is a Mozart/Strauss soprano (she’s sung Eva from Meistersinger, but I can’t see her venturing much further into Wagnerian repertoire). The success of her new recording of Luonnotar is in part due to Leif Segerstam’s finely-judged accompaniment. I’ve always been rather wary of Segerstam’s Sibelius on record. I’m hardly alone; his latest Sibelius cycle on Ondine was summed up in Gramophone as being ‘…provocative, big-hearted and occasionally just bonkers!’. His conducting for Isokoski is right on the money; the purely orchestral climax (at around 5’30’’) is mountainous, but whenever Isokoski is singing, he finds intense and rich colours within a generally piano dynamic that never overwhelm his soloist. The rest of the CD includes a generous selection of orchestral songs, none of them on anything like the scale and significance of Luonnotar. These include Did I just dream?, a song made famous by Kirsten Flagstad. It’s perfectly suited to Isokoski’s warm, expressive voice; surely it’s only the language barrier (most of Sibelius’s songs are in Swedish) that discourages singers from taking them up. This CD complements Katarina Karnéus’s beautiful selection of Sibelius’s songs with piano accompaniment for Hyperion; both CDs are well worth collecting.

Sandy Matheson