Listeners who love Sibelius' music have long ago come to terms with the unavoidable fact that the Finnish master wrote reams of fairly trivial music and a fair amount of frankly terrible music. For every Second Symphony, there are Press Pageants aplenty. For every Fifth Symphony, there are pages of Impromptus and Humoresques for piano. For every Seventh Symphony, there are shelves of Dances characteristique for violin and piano. With this, the 57th volume of BIS' complete Sibelius series, old hand
Osmo Vänskä leads his
Lahti Symphony Orchestra in a program of Sibelius' incidental music -- Sibelius' very incidental music. But, while most of the works on this disc are to music what commencement addresses are to literature, there are still moments when one recognizes the strong, clear voice of Sibelius. The writing for woman's choir in Song of the Earth, with its thirds and sixths, recalls the wind writing of the Fifth Symphony; the string writing in the Scout March with its long, supple lines recalls the string writing in the Sixth Symphony; and some of the woodwind writing in The Captive Queen, with its exotic scales, recalls the woodwind writing in Belshazzar's Feast. While only the most ardent of Sibelius lovers will have to hear this disc, for them despite the variable quality of the music, there will always be the thrill of
Vänskä's marvelously evocative and wonderfully idiomatic performances with the
Lahti and the
Dominante Choir captured in BIS' "as good as being right there in the room with them" sound.