Jean Sibelius - Piano Quintets and Melodramas

Jean SIBELIUS (1865-1957) 

Piano Quintets and Melodramas

Piano Quintet in G minor, JS159 (1890)

Vivace for piano quintet, JS31

Andante – Allegro for piano quintet, JS31

Song from Näcken (The Watersprite), JS138 for soprano, recitation, violin, cello and piano

O, om du sett (Oh, If You Had Seen), JS141 for recitation and piano

Ett ensamt skidspår (A Lonely Ski-Trail), JS77a for recitation and piano

Melodrama from Svartsjukans nätter (Nights of Jealousy), JS125 for recitation, soprano, violin, cello and piano

Anna Kreetta Gribajcevic (Viola)

Monica Groop (Mezzo-Soprano)

Folke Gräsbeck (Piano)

Jaakko Kuusisto (Violin)

Joel Laakso (Cello)

Lasse Pöysti (Narrator)

Laura Vikman (Violin)

Apart from Voces intimae, his final string quartet, the chamber music of Jean Sibelius has been rather over-shadowed by the orchestral masterpieces. Recently, however, research into the composer’s manuscripts and, not least, a number of recordings on BIS have brought this music to a wider audience. On the present disc, three works for piano quintet are combined with four pieces that combine voice (in the shape of recitation as well as song) and instruments. The largest single work is the Quintet in G minor, which with its duration of 38 minutes is ‘undeniably one of the most impressive of all his chamber works, and one in which Sibelius strove for a new ruggedness and severity of mood’, according to the informed liner notes by Andrew Barnett, whose biography of Sibelius is soon to be published by Yale University Press. As the fourth of the Quintet’s five movements Sibelius wrote a Vivace, which was later replaced. This can also be found on the present disc, as well as the slightly earlier ‘Andante – Allegro’ for the same forces. Among the remaining works, The Watersprite was one of Sibelius’ first publicly performed pieces, composed in the same year as the setting of his childhood friend Ellen Hackzell’s short poem Oh, If You Had Seen. Equally brief, but written almost 40 years later, is A Lonely Ski-Trail, with the more substantial ‘Melodrama’ from Nights of Jealousy, another early piece, rounding off the programme.