Sibelius made his breakthrough in 1892 with Kullervo, his big five-movement symphonic poem-cum-symphony. It was the first of his works to draw on the Kalevala, the Finnish national mythology, a source of inspiration throughout his life. Indeed without the Kalevala, Sibelius would no more be Sibelius than he would be without the natural landscape of the North. He liberated in music the very soul of the Finnish psyche in much the same way as Mussorgsky laid bare the Russian soul in his songs; secondly, he absorbed its speech rhythms and contours into his musical language. It is interesting that at about the time of his fiftieth birthday Sibelius went to some lengths to stress to his first biographer Erik Furuhjelm that he had visited Karelia after having composed Kullervo but Tawaststjerna clearly established that Sibelius went there before writing it – specifically to study the runic singing of Larin Paraske, one of its leading practitioners. He also explains Sibelius’s reluctance to have Kullervo performed in later life on two grounds. First, he had intended to revise it but knew that it was basically a fully-realized if immature work which it would be difficult to improve upon without in some way damaging it; secondly, that he was “at pains to appear as a unique phenomenon, uninfluenced by other composers or folk music”. Remember that this was a time when he was being presented to the English-speaking world as, like Berlioz, self-forming and unique. Still, he was not only influenced by the world evoked in the Kalevala but also its verbal music.
In fact Kullervo was not performed until Jussi Salas, Sibelius’s son-in-law, conducted it in 1958, the year after the composer’s death, but the work was not recorded until much later. There have been four earlier commercial recordings, two by Paavo Berglund, in 1971 (HMV, 7/71 – nla) and 1985 (reissued in 1994) respectively, one by Neeme Jarvi and the Gothenburg Orchestra and the most recent by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Common to all has been the commanding dark voice of Jorma Hynninen.
Having found some of Segerstam’s Sibelius highly idiosyncratic, to say the least (he manages to spin out In memoriam to nearly twice its normal length, Chandos, 3/93), it is a relief to find the present performance refreshingly straightforward and agreeably free from expressive point-making. I like the breadth he achieves throughout: his tempos are sound and well chosen. Both Soile Isokoski and Raimo Laukka are effective soloists, but the choral singing, good though it is, does not really match in terms of focus the quality Salonen is given by the Helsinki University choir. The Danish orchestra play with feeling and enthusiasm and receive decent, well-balanced recorded sound. Recommended, then, alongside rather than in preference to Salonen or Berglund.'