Sibelius: The Tempest

Sibelius
The Tempest – complete incidental music
Hanne Fischer, Kari Dahl Nielsen (mezzo), Fredrik Bjellsäter (tenor), Palle Knudsen (baritone), Nicolai Elsberg (bass); Royal Danish Opera Chorus & Orchestra/Okko Kamu
Naxos 8.574419   64:50 mins

Commissioned by the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen for a lavish production to be staged in 1926 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this was Sibelius’s major project between composing his Seventh Symphony and his final tone-poem Tapiola. A sequence of 34 cues for soloists, chorus and large orchestra – including harmonium – his incidental music to the play comprises over an hour of music completed in just four months in the summer of 1925.

Two years later he was to elaborate about two thirds of this music into a pair of orchestral suites, eliminating the voices and sometimes combining different cues into single movements. Listeners  familiar with the suites may be fascinated to hear the familiar ideas in their original, often simpler form – not to mention some spectacular passages Sibelius did not recycle, such as Ariel’s whirlwind entrances and exits, and a sustained passage of astonishing dissonance for Prospero’s rage that he largely cut.

Recorded live in the Copenhagen Opera, the recorded sound in this new release is slightly dryer in ambience than the more resonant, recessed sound of Osmo Vänskä’s previous complete recording of the score for the Sibelius Edition on the BIS label, and maybe a little of that remote, late-Sibelian strangeness is lost here. Maybe, too, the tumultuous opening storm music could have done with a slightly more urgent tempo from the conductor Okko Kamu.

Yet the five vocal soloists are all strongly cast, with an especially generous-voiced Juno (Kari Dahl Nielsen) in the Act IV mask scene – a sumptuous waltz that did not make it into one of the suites – and there is some fine orchestral playing in a score full of memorable sonorous imagery.

Bayan Northcott