(First published on http://musicians.com.sg. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form without permission in writing from the author.)
Looking past the hermeneutic gloss in the blurb on the concert, and the tedious, analytical concert introduction which was probably lost on the masses, one can see the fine achievement by a young orchestra clearly. Aside from a failed attempt by the first violins in the stratospheric heights in the Fourth, and a lackluster horn entry near the beginning of the Second, these players maintained a consistently high level of commitment to technical excellence and musicianship.
Maestro Lim Yau has coached the orchestra well in responding to the Romantic gestures of the Second. Waves of orchestral colour and, in particular, the glorious, rustic mordent that characteristises the first movement, were executed with panache. A strong momentum propelled the Scherzo into the Finale; one must be satiated with heroic feeling at the conclusion.
The second movement of the Second Symphony, I believe, can unlock the mystery of the Fourth. Cadential gestures lead painfully and repeatedly into harmonic impasses. With every fermata, the tension mounts until it reaches its breaking point at the end of the movement, when string pizzicati are plucked in futile protest against the bravado of the tonic chord sounded by the winds. It is as if Sibelius were asking himself, ‘Can a mere cadence at the end suffice to resolve all that has come before?’
From this vantage point, the curious endings of the movements in the Fourth begin to take shape as truncated gestures. The tritone, correctly identified in the programme notes as the germinal seed of the work, is a foundational element of tonal (i.e. ‘of sense of key’) instability that underlies the music throughout. (But the tritone does not, as the notes inaccurately implies, ‘grow’ inside an ‘aural womb’. Rather, its function is to disfigure – as it were – the tonal structure.) Composers have reacted to the dilemma of endings in different ways. Beethoven pounded it relentlessly with tonic chords. Mahler and Wagner created musical behemoths as they unraveled harmonies that set up so much tension that incapable of ending, the composers added more and more… Schoenberg threw the baby out with the bath water.
And Sibelius simply stopped composing for the movements in the Fourth. It is as if the audience is hearing a snippet of music which reveals itself to us momentarily for the length of the movement, before it disappears into the distance (or the cosmic universe/heavens etc.). How do you ‘end’ where no ending is in sight? The failing of the performance lies in its overly austere reading of the score. A truncation is only as powerful as the momentum leading up to it. Anyone who describes this music as ‘intellectual’ has well and truly missed the point. Passionate – but ultimately futile - protests rail against the impossibility of endings throughout the outer movements. If the conclusions of the earlier movements have little effect, it is because the instrumental lines that tear the tonal fabric apart with the tritone were sometimes given cosmetic treatment, and the wailing in the face of the brutal fact of tonality’s inadequacy was not grasped by the throat. A tremulous conclusion in the elliptical ending to the last movement, however, salvaged a meaningful thread from the work.
In spite of its outward appearance, the Fourth has announced the death of tonality. I wonder, though, whether Sibelius’ endings are true insights, or simply truncated -
