Sibelius: Symphony No 4, The Wood Nymph Valse Triste album review – Rouvali’s take is bold but not always brilliant

(Alpha)
The Gothenburg Symphony are outstanding in this all Sibelius disc, but chief conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s fresh approach doesn’t always bring rewards

The previous releases in Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s Sibelius series for Alpha have had a mixed reception; this latest instalment demonstrates why. Very much on the plus side is the outstanding playing of the Gothenburg orchestra, which is bold, incisive and rich toned, with strikingly fine brass. On the negative are many aspects of Rouvali’s interpretations, which often seem to try just a bit too hard to be fresh and original.

Such a moment-by-moment approach is going to be far more effective in the pictorial narratives of a tone poem than in one of Sibelius’s carefully wrought symphonic structures, and it’s hardly surprising that it’s the thrilling performance here of The Wood Nymph, the ballade for orchestra that dates from the mid 1890s and which went unperformed for 60 years until revived by Osmo Vänskä in 1996, that stands out. But the profoundly introspective and austere Fourth Symphony, Sibelius’s closest approach to the expressionism of his Viennese contemporaries, fares less well. Rouvali never seems able to let the music settle and unfold at its own natural pace; he always seems impatient to move it on, to find a new slant on it, and the symphony’s craggy grandeur is fatally undermined.