BBC Music Magazine

Sibelius Symphony No. 1; En Saga

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Gothenburg Symphony/ Santtu-matias Rouvali

Alpha ALPHA 440 58:44 mins

Born in 1985, Santtu-matias Rouvali is among the youngest of a seemingly endless succession of gifted conductors to come out of the Sibelius Academy in ★elsinki. ★ere he steers the Gothenburg Symphony, of which he was appointed Chief Conductor in 2016, through vital and idiomatic live performanc­es of Sibelius’s First Symphony and the revised version of his tone poem En Saga. And, familiar though both works may be, neither exactly plays itself. The Symphony, particular­ly its finale, is full of tempo changes and transition­s that need to be subtly related and integrated, while the tone poem requires the sustaining of a mesmeric intensity across some 19 minutes of minimalist­ic variations upon a handful of exiguous melodic motifs.

Yet Rouvali’s pacing, for the most part, feels instinctiv­ely

‘right’ – his only questionab­le mannerism is a drastic slowing down of the pizzicato chords that end the first and last movements of the Symphony, where Sibelius’s score asks for no such thing. The recording in Gothenburg’s woodlined Concert ★all offers sonorous, yet clear lower textures, and if the high strings and trumpets occasional­ly generate a slight ‘edge’ this is not inappropri­ate to the Symphony’s more Tchaikovsk­ian moments of passion. In all, this is a genuinely competitiv­e release. Bayan Northcott

PERFORMANC­E

RECORDING

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