The spirit of Sibelius

Jean Sibelius -- who became the voice of his country perhaps to a greater degree than any other nationalistic composer ever has -- died of a stroke the last day of summer 1957, in a small artists’ village 20 miles north of the Finnish capital, Helsinki. It is tempting to think that specially picked Finnish music monks, chanting obscure verses of the “Kalevala� in their weird national tongue, immediately went searching for the composer’s reincarnation and found infant Esa-Pekka Salonen 10 months later in Helsinki.

Were that so, the cycle of Sibelius’ seven symphonies that Salonen began with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Friday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall might have been called “Sibelius Reborn.� Instead, it’s called “Sibelius Unbound.�

No Finn can escape Sibelius. He used to be on the 100-mark note before the country switched to the euro. Finland is a musically literate society, and the Sibelius Academy is the heart of its musical education. Sibelius’ tone poem “Finlandia� inspires patriotic fervor.

And then there is the Sibelius monument in Helsinki. It was unveiled in 1967 and is of such surpassing ugliness that any young musician with a proper feeling for great Finnish design and a healthy sense of artistic rebellion has no choice but revolt. Announcing the symphony cycle at a Philharmonic press conference this year, Salonen said that as a young avant-gardist at the Sibelius Academy, he wanted nothing to do with the old man.

Inevitably, Salonen has conducted Sibelius over the years, but he hasn’t made a large practice of it. Now the time has come for him to take a serious look at the symphonies afresh and from the distance of his adopted home thousands of miles away from Helsinki.

This will be his first cycle, and he began it Friday with the Second Symphony, the composer’s most popular. The premiere in 1902 made Sibelius a national hero and international figure. The score, in which gloominess is overwhelmed by triumph, became a Finnish rallying cry of liberation from Russian rule.

Salonen began the concert with “Finlandia,� conducted with proud, inspirational fervor. His own “Wing on Wing,� which had been written for the opening season of Disney Hall, followed.

When premiered in 2004, “Wing on Wing� seemed to represent everything Salonen loves about Los Angeles. It is an ode to his orchestra and a beloved new hall. It is a gorgeous, seductive, spine-tingling score. Two sopranos sing sinuous, ecstatic waves of wordless love song from the stage and side terraces. The architect Frank Gehry is honored with the inclusion of his voice electronically sampled and altered.

The hall is handled as metaphorical sailboat. Two jumbo wind instruments (contrabass clarinet and contrabass bassoon), seated on opposite sides of the stage in front of the orchestra, offer ultra-low-note underwater strangeness. An oddball local fish (plainfin midshipman) gets a moment in the limelight at the center of the work.

At the center of it all is the Philharmonic, playing with percussive glitter and a foamy crashing surf of strings. Many of Salonen’s influences -- Messiaen, Ravel, Lutoslawski, Ligeti -- are apparent in the dazzling orchestration. The piece seems to stand with a foot in the future and one in the past. And that past, I noticed for the first time, is Sibelius.

“Wing on Wing� could not be more Sibelian in its creation of a distinct sound world that is both lonely and communal, celebratory and wistfully not quite of this world. As was Sibelius, Salonen seems as much slave to his musical ideas as their master. Themes evolve as they will and he follows them. Salonen has made some changes, turning the Gehry voice samples into more atmospheric sounds that now better enhance the mysterious aspects of the piece. The sopranos, both lovely in their stratospheric hymning, were Anu Komsi (who sang the premiere) and Stacey Tappan, replacing an indisposed Piia Komsi.

If “Wing on Wing� wound up sounding Sibelian on Friday, the Second Symphony was, in this performance, Salonian. The interpretation was broad and slow. Salonen was literal in tempo changes and accents, which he magnified, making every nuance stand out.

An impressively big, heavy orchestral feel was always favored. Despite the overall sense of unhurriedness, the fast sections suddenly took off like the wind. Here Sibelius really did come off like Salonen, who loves, in his music, to handle the orchestra as a big machine with a furious mind of its own.

Yet, if this was a Second more about sound than sentiment, it was, to be sure, Sibelius unbound from the nationalist cliches that have long been attached to it. The Philharmonic was magnificent.

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