Friday, April 4, 2025

Concert Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, Mannerheimintie 13 A, 00100 Helsinki, Finland

The Lahti Symphony was reunited with a former chief conductor (currently it’s Dalia Stasevska) and Helsinki welcomed them both. Banner finds Jessie Montgomery in Ivesean mode with a range of conflicting musical associations seemingly including ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (or based upon it) and, while reasonably entertaining, Banner doesn’t have much to recommend it as a must-hear-again piece. Maybe not the Aho either, although its seamless (rhapsodic) unfolding asks questions as to the music’s development in the first movement; the eloquent if edgy central Adagio is more straightforward in its emotional rise and fall, and the lively Finale has a folksy feel if becoming knottier and hectic. Tami Pohjola impressed throughout, and the composer was present. Not as recent as either if more harmonically adventurous, the quick-change, filmic Pingoud made the bigger impression, leaving the Sibelius as the evening’s masterpiece in an equally masterly, wholesome performance of rhythmical verve and ppp enigmas, with Osmo Vänskä siding with Kajanus (as did Colin Davis) in choosing a spacious tempo for the middle movement, here a suave waltz, going on to making the Finale inevitable, the closing bars featuring triumphant horns with ‘bells-up’ clarinets cutting through.

Jessie Montgomery: Banner
Kalevi Aho: Violin Concerto No.2
Ernest Pingoud: Prologue symphonique
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No.3 in C Major Op.52