YL mediassa

This gigantic score, comparable to Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, is variously called a symphony, symphonic poem or cantata. It's all of the above ‹ five movements, of which three qualify as tone poems in their own right, while the middle (and longest, at about twenty-five minutes), "Kullervo and His Sister," is a dramatic scene for two singers and chorus, and the finale is a choral epilogue.

Writing Kullervo as a student in Vienna in 1891-92, Sibelius meant to encompass the heroic scale of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic poem, wrapping a single episode in a primeval musical environment. The subject he chose, however, was rather anti-heroic: Kullervo, a born ne'er-do-well, ends his own life after learning that a girl he seduced on his travels was his own sister, a soul as lost as himself. The characters of the Kalevala, like those of the Odyssey and the Iliad, are all too human.

Sibelius soon moderated his youthful ambition, never again stretching so broad a canvas, and Kullervo was revived only after his death in 1957. In recent years it has had a renaissance: Ondine's new recording, made in Finlandia Hall (Helsinki) in December 2007, follows on the heels of another excellent one, under Colin Davis, on the LSO label. Like Davis, Leif Segerstam gives equal scope to the work's ruminative atmosphere and elemental narrative flow. Whether in the big, striding melodies of the first movement, the hypnotically floating dance meters of the second or the inexorable throbbing of the fifth, Segerstam stirs his orchestra to grasp the length and breadth of the piece and make it live. Furthermore, while pointing up piquant details and local colors, he never lets the underlying narrative pulse go slack.

The soloists tell their somber stories with unflinching tonal focus and dramatic thrust. Soprano Soile Isokoski's recollection of the sister's getting lost on the mountain as a child and wanting to die there ‹ which she now will do ‹ is offered with penetrating emotion and keening intensity. Baritone Tommi Hakala, when his turn comes, musters the same directness and intensity to express Kullervo's frustration with his forlorn life and futile prospects. The male chorus sings with stern unanimity and atmospheric feeling, especially in the insistent bardic strophes of the final dirge. And the record sound spaciously takes it all in.