E-Mail This Article to a Friend Swan songs Those Sibelius symphonies . . . BY JEFFREY GANTZ

Lost in the media and audience buzz over the BSO-commissioned world premiere of Milton Babbitt’s Concerti for Orchestra a couple of weeks back were James Levine’s performances of two of the premier symphonies of the 20th century, Sibelius’s No. 4 in A minor and No. 5 in E-flat. Back in the 1930s, BSO music director Serge Koussevitzky was an early adherent of Sibelius. But apart from a spell in the mid 1970s when BSO principal guest conductor Colin Davis recorded all seven symphonies for Philips, Symphony Hall hasn’t hosted much Sibelius over the past 50 years, so it was gratifying to have Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund do Nos. 6 and 7 with the BSO last March and now Levine in 4 and 5.

Among early-20th-century composers, Sibelius is thought of as conservative next to Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, and Webern, and yet the A-minor Symphony, which premiered in 1911, is in its own way as radical as Le sacre du printemps, which Stravinsky produced two years later. It’s not just the last movement, which doesn’t so much conclude as stop, and at an unprecedented mezzoforte dynamic level. (Symphonies had ended loud and they’d ended soft, but never in between.) In the Kalevala, the Finnish epic that inspired many of Sibelius’s works, the smith Ilmarinen goes north to forge the Sampo only to discover that there’s no forge, no anvil, no tools — and centuries later, no one is quite sure what the Sampo is, except that it grinds grain, salt, and money. Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony tries to forge itself without conventional themes and with no apparent idea of what it’s supposed to be; when at the end of the Largo third movement a yearning melody in C-sharp minor define itself, it at once falls back into fragments, just as the Sampo does. (More than one Saturday-evening concertgoer was heard humming the tune in the men’s room at intermission.) The "Glocken" in the final movement are another enigma: did Sibelius want a glockenspiel or tubular bells? In his program note on the symphony, Michael Steinberg makes a persuasive argument for the latter, but Levine, like most conductors, opted for the glockenspiel.

The Fifth, in the heroic key of E-flat (Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Emperor Concerto, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, many more), evolved from the usual four movements in its first (1915) and second (1916) incarnations to three in its third (1919), the opening 12/8 movement gliding into the 3/4 scherzo as smoothly as the sleigh in which another Kalevala hero, old Väinämöinen, tries to pick up Pohjola’s beautiful daughter, the tempo gradually accelerating throughout. The skipping second movement gives birth to the themes for its successor and then dies; one of those themes, the big, wide-swinging one, was inspired by the composer’s sighting of 16 migrating swans circling over his home. It too circles, but just when it seems to have found its center, it undergoes a further evolution. Sibelius’s symphonies as a group evolve rather than develop and recapitulate in the usual sonata-form fashion, and his phrases float across bar lines the way the pitch (rather than stress, as in English) accent of the Finnish language floats across the meter of the Kalevala.

So it’s the realization as well as the meaning of his works that can be elusive. Levine in his performances of two weeks back as well as on his 1995 Deutsche Grammophon recording with the Berlin Philharmonic brings an almost Mozartian cogency to Nos. 4 and 5 that’s both ear-opening and, like the klezmerish clarinet runs in the last movement of No. 4, unidiomatic. That disc, like too many of his Deutsche Grammophon releases, seems out of the catalogue at the moment, but his 1993 performance of No. 2 with the Berliners, one whose inspired final pages just keep getting infinitesimally slower, has been re-released on Universal Classics (at $8) and was sighted at Tower recently.

There are classic early recordings of No. 4 from Arturo Toscanini (Music & Arts) and Thomas Beecham (BBC Legends) and of No. 5 from Sibelius’s close friend Robert Kajanus (Finlandia) and Serge Koussevitzky with the BSO (Pearl). The Sibelius tempo standard was obviously faster back then, and only the mercurial Kajanus manages not to sound driven (though the London Symphony Orchestra members don’t all arrive at the end of the first movement in the same sleigh). Recordings of Nos. 4 and 5 on the same disc are few: Petri Sakari with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra (Naxos) is weak in the big moments; Lorin Maazel with the Pittsburgh Symphony (Sony) is more eccentric than enigmatic.

It’s the Finnish conductors, no surprise, who are most comfortable with Sibelius’s language; their performances generally distribute the weight across the bar rather than leaning on the downbeat, asking questions rather than giving answers. At the end of the first movement of Paavo Berglund’s No. 5 with the Helsinki Philharmonic (EMI), the quarter notes in the strings, galloping away like Väinämöinen’s horses and not buried by the brass and the percussion, propel the movement to its conclusion without the conductor’s having to resort to a blurring tempo. Osmo Vänskä, who shows a similar attention to Sibelius’s ebb and flow, has performances of the 1915 and 1919 versions of No. 5 on one invaluable BIS disc with the Lahti Symphony. But Simon Rattle with the City of Birmingham Symphony in No. 4 (EMI) and Vladimir Ashkenazy with the Philharmonia in No. 5 (Decca), both patient explorers, prove that non-Finns can be fluent in this repertoire. And grand old man of Sibelius interpretation remains Herbert von Karajan, whose bear-like readings, soft and furry on the outside but firm and implacable within, offer a glimpse of the Finnish forest god Tapio. Karajan’s ’60s recordings of Symphonies 4 through 7 with the Berlin Philharmonic are available on two mid-priced Deutsche Grammophon discs, with, fittingly, the tone poem Tapiola ("Tapio’s Realm") thrown in as a bonus.