Last Updated: May 31, 2000
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One of five winning entries by Justin Davidson of Newsday, Melville,
N.Y. that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished
Writing Awards.
Thursday. December 18, 1997
THE COMPOSER Jean Sibelius, who was born during the middle of Brahms’
career in 1865 and died in the middle of Leonard Bernstein's in 1957, remains
one of the most popular and mysterious composers of the 20th Century. In
his own life and for decades since, he was routinely berated as a reactionary
in a musically progressive era, the artistic equivalent of the old man
who refuses to sell his dilapidated shack to make way for a highway. Forty
years after his death, however, his music has stubbornly outlasted the
fashions he ignored, and during Lincoln Center's two-week "Northern Lights"
festival, it sounded newly modern.
After Sibelius’ reputation broke beyond his native Finland in the 1890s,
he was always a significant composer, simultaneously adored and reviled
for his grand symphonic style full of horn calls and sincerity, and his
melodies redolent of ancient myths. Even the critics who attacked him treated
him as an important bad composer. Virgil Thomson, one of America's most
influential midcentury tastemakers, devoted a chunk of his very first professional
music review (for the New York Herald Tribune, in 1940) to the opinion
that Sibelius was "vulgar, self indulgent, and provincial beyond all description."
The French critic Rene Liebowitz wrote a whole book conveying on Sibelius
the unquestionable distinction of being "the world's worst composer." No
artist worth lavishing such invective on can be all bad.
As a composer, Sibelius assiduously avoided cliches and yet he was almost
always seen through their prism. Thomson's word "provincial," for instance,
tapped into the popular image of the flinty Finn ensconced in his rural
sub-arctic retreat, surrounded and inspired by pines, snow and silence.
Used in 1940, when Finland was fending off Soviet invasion, the word "provincial"
also meant nationalistic - a smirking nod to the fact that Sibelius had
helped bring Finland into being (the country achieved independence from
both Russia and Sweden in 1917). Even today, the hero-composer's legacy
looms over the small nation he helped create: For one thing, virtually
every important Finnish musician who came after him was educated at Helsinki's
conservatory, called the Sibelius Academy.
Lincoln Center's festival began with a high-intensity, three-concert
dose of Sibelius’ symphonic music, gorgeously performed by Sir Colin Davis
and the London Symphony Orchestra. The three concerts, which included five
symphonies, two tone poems, the violin concerto and a fistful of orchestral
songs, would have been festive enough (if Sibelius’ doggedly serious music
can be thought of as festive). But Lincoln Center supplemented those events
with a series of smaller concerts and a symposium. Capping the two weeks
was a concert of contemporary Finnish music performed by the chamber group
Avanti!, which seemed designed to test the ornery prediction, made by the
composer Constant Lambert in 1934, that "of all contemporary music that
of Sibelius seems to point forward most surely to the future."
Ah, but which future? Surely not that of the Finnish musicians who came
of age in the 1970s, sloughed off their Sibelian birthright, acquired educational
pedigrees in Italy, France and Germany and swore allegiance to the flag
of international modernism. Their organ of dissemination was Avanti!, an
ensemble founded in 1983 by the conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen (now music
director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and Jukka-Pekka Saraste (now
music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra). The group's youthful,
cosmopolitan credo was encapsulated in its pointedly non-Finnish name,
which, in Italian, is the battle cry "Forward!"
"Ours is the first generation of [Finnish] composers for whom Sibelius
is not a problem," once said the composer and member of the Salonen-Saraste
gang Magnus Lindberg, whose 1995 work "Arena 2" closed Avanti's concert.
How ironic, then, that the group should have made its New York debut Monday
as the tag end of a Sibelius festival.
In that context, Monday's concert, which took place in an Alice Tully
Hall that looked about as densely populated as Finland itself, seemed like
a declaration of independence. Kaaija Saariaho's "Graal Theatre," a concerto
for violin and chamber ensemble, placed a solo part of grinding intensity
against a stark background of pinpoint dissonances - the virtual opposite
of Sibelius^ plummy and popular Violin Concerto. Lindberg's "Arena 2" was
as dense, bristling and urban in feel as Sibelius^ symphonies are spacious
and steeped in Nordic nature.
But, though the Avanti! players were very young and very good and most
of the works freshly composed, the concert's pose of modernity seemed dated,
burdened by a high-culture rigor that today's young American composers,
at least, are glad to be able to shuck off. And there is the twist of "Northern
Lights": that Sibelius^ style, which once sounded like the gouty and distended
aftereffect of excessive Romanticism, now seems to have acquired a prescient
austerity. Sibelius was chastised for his willingness to linger on a plush,
comfortable chord, for relentlessly stitching and restitching a good melodic
phrase, for designing vast musical tapestries with a couple of bare ideas,
for making crude and illogical jumpcuts from one passage to the next.
But now newer styles have made virtues of Sibelius^ mannerisms: the
sluggish chords and darting rhythms of American minimalism, the stark spiritual
landscapes of the popular Estonian Arvo Part, the lushly evocative symphonic
style of the young New York composer Richard Danielpour. After nearly a
century in which intellectuals assumed that Sibelius^ Mt. Rushmore face
was gazing into the past, in New York in 1997, it now looks as though he
did have his eye on the future after all - or at least on that slice of
future that is our present.
