Sibelius - In the Stream of Life; Pohjola’s Daughter etc

The Guardian 80

Finley/Bergen PO/Gardner
(Chandos)

As well as being one of the 20th century’s supreme orchestral composers, Sibelius produced around 100 songs. Yet he wrote very little original music for voice and orchestra. The shining exception is Luonnotar, for soprano and orchestra, which is one of his greatest achievements in any genre, but nothing else in his vocal output comes close to matching that work’s dramatic power and originality. As a result, the 14 songs with orchestra that bass-baritone Gerald Finley sings with the Bergen Philharmonic include just one, the rather ballad-like and melodramatic Koskenlaskijan Morsiamet (The Rapids-Rider’s Bride) from 1897, that was conceived with orchestra. It’s also the only song here with a text in Finnish; there are single settings of German and English, but the great majority are in Swedish, Sibelius’s first language.

Finley also includes three songs the composer did orchestrate himself, one a haunting setting of Shakespeare’s Come Away, Death, from Twelfth Night (in Swedish), which Sibelius arranged a few months before he died in 1957. There are arrangements by others, too, but the centrepiece is The Stream of Life, a sequence of seven songs that Einojuhani Rautavaara arranged especially for Finley, who gave the first performance in Bergen in 2014.