PURE spring water: that’s how Vaughan Williams described the art of Sibelius. And no one can pour it and serve it like Paavo Berglund. The 76-year-old Finnish conductor may take his time to reach London these days and, indeed, to reach the podium, where he sits awkwardly perched on the conductor’s stool. But his vision — and his response to his master’s voice — is as unadulterated and as life-enhancing as ever.
In the inexorable Sibelius revival of the past decades, the symphonies have been exalted into neo-Romantic glory, set up as noble symbols of the Nordic sublime, and stripped to bare bone and lithe muscle by a new generation of conductors. Berglund does none of these things. Yet his recordings still top the charts, and his performances continue to pack concert halls to capacity.
So it was on Wednesday, when Berglund raised his baton at the start of the Second Symphony — and a surge of energy hit the opening string chords. They are the seeds of the entire symphony, and watching them grow, through to their final efflorescence, was constantly compelling.
Not only does Berglund know exactly how to make the strings phrase in such a way that both tempo and texture remain in perfect, potent balance, but he has an obvious linguistic advantage. Only in performances by Berglund (and, more recently by Osmo Vänskä) do you really feel the pulsing heartbeat of the Finnish language, the melody and metre of the national epic, the Kalevala, which provides the deep-breathing system of so much of what Sibelius wrote.
In this symphony Berglund’s instinctive feeling for this life-force gave sweetness, light and great clarity to the second movement. The “rubato”, (literally “robbed time”) that Sibelius indicates here became such an integral part of its melodic and harmonic life that the ear was never numbed by cliché or indeed manipulated by expressive indulgence. And, for similar reasons, the mighty momentum of the third movement into the finale was never overfevered. The great swings into bright major-key light had an austere and noble inevitability.
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Both Sibelius and Elgar had to fight to make themselves heard in postwar England and Germany: their faces didn’t quite fit music’s new profile. No wonder each championed the other — and on Wednesday we witnessed another happy reunion. The Dutch cellist Peter Wispelwey may not have been an obvious casting choice for Elgar’s Cello Concerto; but his idiosyncratic sculpting rather than singing of the music’s soul brought new, sometimes challenging, insight.