Three other great recordings

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

The antipodes might seem like an unlikely source of a seriously fine Sibelius cycle, but the tenure of Finland’s Pietari Inkinen as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s music director produced just that. Orchestral quality shines in every department in this 2011 recording, with the strings’ excellence no doubt relating to Inkinen’s parallel career as a violinist. This is musicmaking that’s fresh and alert in every bar, with a lovely tawny overall sound, plenty of atmosphere in the quiet moments, and total avoidance of inflated rhetoric. (Naxos 8.572227)

Anthony Collins (conductor)

Collins’s reputation as a conductor largely rests on the outstanding Sibelius recordings he made with the London Symphony Orchestra for Decca in the early 1950s – in monophonic sound exceptional for the period, decent enough even now – reissued here on the Beulah label. Collins’s way with the Fifth Symphony still sounds special, combining purposeful directness with a wonderful way of allowing the music’s poetic streak to come forward naturally. (Beulah 4PD8)

Osmo Vänskä (conductor)

Vänskä’s first recording of the Fifth offers a trump card in presenting both surviving versions of the symphony – 1915 and 1919 – on one CD. He and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra make such a strong case for the

1915 score that you sometimes find yourself regretting that Sibelius made quite as many changes as he did.

The performance of the final version, while not quite rising clear of stellar competition elsewhere, is sure-footed and imaginative; the build-up towards the first movement’s headlong conclusion is brilliantly brought off. (BIS BISCD863)

And one to avoid…

Dating from 1965, this recording was made at the height of Herbert von Karajan’s fixation on extracting the richest possible sound from his Berlin Philharmonic players. Fifty years later, the result continues to polarise opinion. As a richly burnished sonic-fest, the playing is phenomenal, with sumptuous weight of tone in the closing peroration. But then again, if you like Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony to be more about Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony and less about a Karajan-led parade of externally applied dramatics, it’s probably best to steer clear.