theartsdesk at the Lahti Sibelius Festival - early epics by the Finnish master in context

It’s weird, if wonderful, that vibrant young composers at the end of the 19th century should have featured death so prominently in their hero-sagas. Assume their inspiration came from Wagner’s Siegmund, Siegfried and Tristan. But Sibelius, Mahler and Richard Strauss took very different paths on the route to obliteration. That’s only one of many things that helps to make Hannu Lintu’s three-year exploration of Sibelius in the context of his predecessors and contemporaries so fascinating.

The Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s new Artistic Partner (pictured below by Antti Sihlman) not only took on ambitious programmes, but has a style which both announces him a true original in the broad sweep of his interpretations and a top pupil of the great conducting master Jorma Panula, distinguished by the same masterly mixture of spacious clarity and pure adrenalin charges where necessary as other disciples Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Mikko Franck and, most recently. Klaus Mäkelä (whom I’d heard at his absolute best with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra less than a week earlier). Kickstarting and sustaining the rainbow of colours Lintu draws from the now-legendary Lahti players was the pinch-yourself-to-believe-it liveliness of the great Sibelius Concert Hall beside Lake Vesijärvi, acoustically the best I’ve heard alongside KKL Lucerne and MUPA Budapest, which shares the same acoustic design by Artec Consultants Inc, New York (foyer view with lake reflection pictured below). The late Russell Johnson apparently said he wanted Müpa's Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest to be ideal for Wagner, and in the performance of the single act from The Ring on Friday, we found the same to be true of the Sibeliusitalo. I’m spared the spadework on the venue’s wonders by my previous feature on the Sibelius Festival of the 150th anniversary in 2016.

Suffice it to say that there was an electric charge at the start of each work in the two main concerts I attended of 2026’s three (five including two chamber recitals). The gutty upper-string tremolo at the start of Mahler’s Totenfeier, his “funeral rites” for the hero of the First Symphony which soon became the opening movement of his Second linked with its fierce counterpart, and more insistent bass trudge as Siegmund makes his way through a brutal storm at the start of the first act in Wagner’s Die Walküre. The heroic gesture at the start of Kullervo was answered by the gorgeous horn chord which poses a question of what next at the beginning of the Lemminkäinen Suite (Sibelius started the original version of his Fifth Symphony with the same chord). None of these primal gestures have had quite the same impact from any other orchestra I’ve heard in any other hall. There’s also something about the liveness of the silences, though Lintu played his part in timing them just right. What used to be seen as a weakness in early Mahler and Sibelius came across as a strength here, as if the lamentations have difficulty picking themselves up again in the original Totenfeier movement (there are dramatic breaks in the more familiar version in the Second Symphony, but none as arresting as the one we heard here, into which a tentative clarinet eventually sneaks). Many of the instrumental doublings or extra linings which Mahler removed in his revision were allowed to tell here in an environment especially sympathetic to inner lines.

The last time I heard Kullervo was from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo at the Proms, just before they repeated the experience at the 2015 anniversary Sibelius Festival in Lahti (I arrived just after them during a week of celebrations). Before these performances, I’d always thought that Sibelius’s five-movement tribute to the doomed Finnish hero of the Kalevala was good in parts. But again last week there seemed no weaknesses, not even in the occasional orchestral thickening amid the experimentation. A good companion here, though it would have unbalanced an already full programme, might have been the Overture to Jenůfa which Janáček eventually detached and called Žárlivost (Jealousy), because there is something proto-Janáčekian about the extraordinary high textures as Kullervo’s seduction of the maid who turns out to be his sister is illustrated in a powerful orchestral interlude between dramatic singing.

“Kullervo and his Sister” is the movement that always sets the pulses racing, its 5/4 trepak composed two years earlier than the second-movement waltz celebrated for that metre in Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. The familiar wall of Finnish male voices had more nuance than usual, especially in the hypnotic build towards Kullervo’s suicide in the finale. Two superb soloists acted out the drama of the girl Kullervo entices into his sleigh, twice unsuccessfully, the third time with disastrous results. Scores didn’t impede their commitment. Charismatic American bass-baritone Davóne Tines (pictured above with Lintu) appropriately dressed in battle skirt and blue stockings, just about managed the insanely high cursing at the end of the movement (a stress-point which had led even as magnificent a baritone as Peter Mattei to give up mid-performance). Johanna Rusanen reflected every mood with vivid communication and bright, unassailable tone. I’d love to see her as Brünnhilde, a role she’s sung at the Finnish National Opera with its music director – Lintu, of course (the week before the Sibelius Festival, he’d conducted the second act of Tristan in Helsinki).

Lintu’s Lahti Wagner act, focusing on siblings who embark on a passionate love affair in full knowledge of who they are, came the following night in the company of the four Lemminkäinen tone poems which, in an interpretation as broad and powerful as this, amounted to Sibelius’s second symphony. Here’s a hero who suffers in love, Tristan-style (incredible intensity there from the Lahti strings), and is teased for it by the maidens of Saari, and who actually gets to return home alive, though here it’s the middle movements which are preoccupied with death in the land of Tuonela, the Finnish Hades. Unlike some conductors, Lintu refused to rush or indulge in excessive rhetoric as the tremolos rise through the most daring of the movements, the third (“The Swan of Tuonela”, the second, is of course, the most originally coloured, a negative image of Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude). Again, the balance between sustained power and sheer elan which I defined as a Panula inheritance made this reward enough for a single evening. But then we had the whole of Die Walküre’s opening act. If you want to sample Lintu’s conducting style, watch the Prelude on one of the films available for the next three weeks. The burning intensity of the upper-string tremolos at the start, the steady build towards an unerring climax as Donner’s theme scythes its way through the textures: this is masterly. Then we had the exquisite teamwork of first cellist Sanna Palas with her colleagues in the love music as Siegmund and Sieglinde look into each other’s eyes for the first time.

At first, it was only the noble, far from brutish sound of bass Ain Anger, keenly inflecting as custom-bound Hunding, with which one felt entirely secure; the fast vibrato in the powerful vocal armoury of Miina-Liisa Värelä and the youthful but sometimes short-winded brightness of Klaus Florian Vogt (all three pictured below by Antti Sihlman with Hanny Lintu) gave cause for a smidgen of concern about the marathon ahead. But Värelä has already proved her staying power as Isolde at Glyndebourne, while Vogt has survived Siegfried in Zurich. They both paced themselves towards gleaming nodal points, never failing in the upper registers. The love-scene proper from a very tender “Winterstürme” onwards, Sieglinde’s pauses for thought just before the drawing of the sword from the tree supremely atmospheric, proved incandescent. No scores this time: the relationships were clearly drawn, even if you wouldn't expect the sort of characterisations Barrie Kosky drew from his singers in the recent Royal Opera Walküre. I don’t know how regularly Finnish audiences give standing ovations, but there was no doubt at all that this deserved, and got, one.

That afternoon early Sibelius chamber music stood in the shadow of a memorable Tchaikovsky quartet movement, the B flat major winner from 1865, a shining example of how to present simple, then personable, material, superbly played by the ILOA Quartet (pictured below by Antti Sihlman). Sibelius’s A minor Quartet of 1889 began well, but loses its coherence trying to convey its thoughts; the Piano Sonata of 1893 called for stentorian virtuosity that doesn’t suit the composer, though Ossi Tanner's performance was magnificently resonant. It was a pleasurable enough event, all the same, especially after a swim in one of Lahti’s smaller lakes. The changing skies reflected on the big one (sunset on the first evening pictured below), the constant wonder of the foyer with its ceiling lights arranged in the pattern of the constellations on the night of Sibelius’s birth and its forest of pillars in different woods, enriched the whole experience. I was sorry to miss the third concert, with the First Symphony preceded by Grieg and Sibelius songs with Karita Mattila (also available to watch online), but Handel’s Alexander’s Feast summoned me back to the Proms. Next year Lintu will kick off with another adventurer’s career abruptly snuffed out in Strauss’s Don Juan, and will include Busoni’s titanic Piano Concerto with Kirill Gerstein, a Sibelius symphony featuring in each of the three successors to this year's celebration. If you fancy a long weekend in September split between nature and music-making at the highest level, I can’t think of a better place than Lahti.

• Watch the concerts on SL Classic Live for the next three weeks 
• More classical music reviews on theartsdesk