Royal Festival Hall, London
Rating: ***
Pavo Berglund has been an infrequent visitor to London of late. He was in charge of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra during the 1970s and has since held a succession of posts with Scandinavian orchestras. At a time when a younger generation of Finnish conductors (Salonen, Vanska, Saraste) has established itself in spectacular fashion, it was good in this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert to be reminded of the virtues of his honest, uncomplicated music-making. Sibelius has always been a Berglund speciality - he made the very first recording of the Kullervo Symphony - and the Fourth Symphony was the highlight of a programme in which all three works were in a minor key, even though Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto is anything but melancholic.
Berglund took a fierce, uncompromising line through the symphony. He made no attempt to apply a cosmetic continuity to the bleak block-construction of the first movement and allowed only the tiniest glimmers of warmth into the scherzo. In the largo, which seemed more than usually haunted by the world of the third act of Wagner's Parsifal, the fragments of the theme were assembled into a despairing statement; the coda of the finale was nothing but tragic. The torn-off endings to all the movements had an unmistakable bleakness; if the Fourth really was Sibelius's reaction to modernism (it was composed in 1910 after he had heard some of Schoenberg's early pieces), then, Berglund's discomfiting performance suggested, it was a response that saw no musical future whatsoever in such radicalism.
The LPO was on solid, responsive form, with their sturdy brass providing a baleful commentary; and they had produced a burnished depth of dark tone for Brahms's Tragic Overture, which Berglund carved out in grand rhetorical paragraphs. They accompanied the Mendelssohn concerto adroitly enough, even if that was a rather routine account. Soloist Tasmin Little played well enough, though her phrasing was unremarkable; if the automatic-pilot button hadn't quite been pressed, her finger was certainly hovering very close to it.
