Sunday, July 13, 2025
7:00 PM
Conductor Thomas Adés leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a program featuring Sibelius’s only concerto, performed by Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, a work by Gabriella Smith that portrays the sizzling sand and pounding surf of Point Reyes, California, and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5.
Thomas Adés, conductor
Pekka Kuusisto, violin
Gabriella SMITH Tumblebird Contrails
Jean SIBELIUS Violin Concerto
SIBELIUS Symphony No. 5
For more information on Tanglewood concerts, visit the BSO box office.
To hear a preview of Sibelius's Violin Concerto with soloist Pekka Kuusisto, use the player below and read the transcript underneath.
TRANSCRIPT:
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Tanglewood with Pekka Kuusisto, who is here for the first time at Tanglewood. So Pekka, thank you for a little bit of your time today. I appreciate it.
Pekka Kuusisto My pleasure, my pleasure.
Brian McCreath When you came to Boston in 2024, you played the [Violin] Concerto by Carl Nielsen. And at that time, it was sort of a mini festival around Nordic music, and you gave me a few insights into the way that Carl Nielsen reflects a Nordic sort of music. How does Sibelius in his Violin Concerto reflect any of that?
Pekka Kuusisto This is fitting because I think Sibelius thought Nielsen to be one of the few people who actually understood his music. Nielson wrote a very nice letter to Sibelius about some of his symphonies, I think, and Sibelius thought, finally somebody gets it! Sibelis, when he was younger—I believe until he was 23, 24— Plan A was to become a heroic, soloistic violinist. And he admired people like Walentin and Wieniawski. A lot of the early pieces that he wrote when he was still basically only a violin player, they reflect a lot that style, that kind of virtuosity. And then I suppose to make a long story short, "Kullervo" Symphony happens and he starts to sound more like Sibelius and less like Wieniawski.
But funny enough, when you look at the Violin Concerto, especially the original version that doesn't really get performed. You see that he's... I think it's partly nostalgia and partly just because he wanted to employ a very virtuosic, violinistic language. He shoplifts quite a lot, for example, from Wieniawski's Second [Violin] Concerto. There's a particular grip, like a particular chord, that doesn't sit well in anyone's left hand, that is on the second page of the solo part of Wieniawski Two. And a lot of the solo part of the Sibelius [Violin] Concerto is actually based around that kind of weird, diminished thing that resolves in a very uncomfortable way, violinistically. And I was actually just speaking to a wonderful guy called Jaakko Ilves, who is the great-grandson of Sibelius and a violin teacher in Helsinki. He's a very accomplished violinist himself, and he was speaking about how he feels now about the Sibelius Concerto, and how he keeps seeing more and more influences from pieces like the Beethoven [Violin] Concerto and the Mendelssohn [Violin] Concerto. The arpeggios in the end of the first movement, also in the middle of the original version where there's this kind of awkward polyrhythmic thing, it used to be a straightforward copy of what happens in the Mendelssohn Concerto's second movement. Because the musical language of Sibelius's Concerto is so exclusively him, it's easy to not really notice how much of the violinistic vocabulary he uses in the piece is familiar from other pieces.
Brian McCreath Last year, you quoted a letter from Nielsen to Sibelius, and I want to see your reaction to that quote because I wonder how much this Violin Concerto is or is not related to the symphonies and other works by Sibelius. So you quoted Nielsen's writing, "Master Sibelius, your music cannot be measured with the instruments of pharmacists, but with the instruments of farmers, where the scales are so big that the horses and carriages go up on them. That's the way to measure the weight of your music." Does that apply to Sibelius's Concerto?
Pekka Kuusisto I think it does. I think a lot of it happens in the connection between soloist, conductor, and orchestra. How well—despite the violinistic difficulties and the tendencies of violinists to sometimes shape music according to what the instrument is telling you to and not so much what the score is telling you to do—how much you can transcend that, the more you can, I would say, the more the big structures of the [Violin] Concerto emerge. And of course, interestingly, in the Sibelius Concerto, the one thing that usually gets mentioned is that the soloist takes care of the entire development section of the whole movement alone in the cadenza, and it's brilliant because Nielsen gives the cadenza to the soloist right at the top of the Concerto. So you sort of introduce the whole material. Sibelius allows the soloists to decide how the material evolves. And that's, I think, particularly interesting because it is violinistically very tricky, the cadenza. But somehow you try to achieve at least the same amount of lift and strength, force, that an entire orchestra can conjure up, and of course it being a development section, one expects a certain degree of tumult. And sometimes when you're just trying to figure out how to make the notes work on a violin, it's easy to lose the thread a little bit. But we'll see what happens this time. [McCreath laughs]
Brian McCreath It's new every time, and in fact, I think your only recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto was done 30 years ago now, roughly.
Pekka Kuusisto Yeah.
Brian McCreath And yet, you were just showing me before we turned on the recorder the new critical edition of this piece, and how much it's stimulating your thinking. How different does this piece feel to you now from how it felt three decades ago?
Pekka Kuusisto The world feels very different. My hands, my body feels very different, and the way I handle the violin obviously becomes very different with age—sometimes fortunately, sometimes sadly. But with the new critical edition of the Concerto as a part of a larger project involving basically all of Sibelius' music, which is great, often his markings and his comments on performances and the things that he altered in orchestra parts when he would visit an orchestra, they are often very confusing. And there is a team of very clever people making the editorial decisions for these new materials and then supplying us mortals with all the information about what led them to decide like this.
But one thing that jumps out at you in the new edition of the [Violin] Concerto, the new orchestra score, is that the placement of the hairpin dynamics, like the phrasing of individual themes and phrases, and often also the articulation markings, are quite different from what is in the good old printed violin part. And it becomes obvious that the violin part that we all learned from as fiddle players is not edited by Sibelius himself, but by somebody who we don't know. We don't know actually if there ever was an original handwritten solo part by Sibelius himself. It is lost somewhere in the archives of Lienau in Germany—Lienau the music publisher. But when you look at the new critical edition as I said, a lot of the where to put the emphasis in a phrase becomes very different. I think the way he drew hairpin dynamics in this chorus, it was sometimes difficult to understand if he is meaning an accent or a diminuendo, for example, and that's not uncommon among composers. But just the placement, where in the measures these things happen... You know, there's this famous little video from I think an award ceremony in the UK where you have a bunch of brilliant actors plus King Charles reciting "To be or not to be, that is the question," and each one of them places the emphasis on the word after the previous person. "To be or to not to, to be or not be, to be or not to be." The whole thing changes, and this is kind of the same thing we're dealing with now in the Sibelius Concerto.
Brian McCreath Fascinating. It turns out, just by the way schedules work, that you're doing this with Thomas Adès, who I know from talking to him, holds Sibelius very close to his own musical personality. Have you worked with Thomas Adès before? And in this particular setting, how does working on Sibelius with him feel so far?
Pekka Kuusisto I've worked with him several times: quite a few times on his own Violin Concerto, and then on a piece called "Märchentänze," which is a smaller piece for violin and orchestra that he wrote for me during the pandemic. We have worked on the "Humoresques" by Sibelius several times, but never on the [Violin] Concerto. And it's obvious that he feels very strongly about Sibelius. It's obvious that he studied these compositions both as a fan but also as a fellow composer, so he wants to understand what Sibelius does. Tom's style of rehearsing is he gives a lot of responsibility and freedom to the players. I think he's basically painting a landscape, and the players do the individual trees and stones, and I think it's probably quite spot on what Sibelius would have wanted. I think there is even a letter from Sibelis to a conductor saying, "Let the details swim in the sauce." [Kuusisto chuckles] And of course, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was very familiar to Sibelius, probably the most luxurious source imaginable to him. [Kuusisto laughs] And so, you could say that there are wonderfully large forces at play, and my job is to build what I can in the first movement to romance as much as I can in the second movement, and then according to Sibelius's own guidance to play, "von Orben," "from above" in the last movement to try to relive his fantasies of being a Wieniawski-style virtuoso.
Brian McCreath Speaking of rocks and trees, as mentioned, this is your first time here at Tanglewood. Tell me what your impression is having rehearsed on the stage of the Koussevitsky Music Shed and wandered the grounds here at Tanglewood.
Pekka Kuusisto Yeah! My experience of the significant American summer festivals so far are limited to very, very short trips and to, well, actually very long trips to Ravinia in the '90s. I was a student there, so we would stay five weeks. I went to Karamoor last year, it was wonderful. And I've played these kinds of hit-and-run concerts at some of the festivals when I was younger and needed the money. [Kuusisto chuckles] But I got here a couple of days ago, and I'm gradually getting over my jet lag. I went last night to see a concert at Ozawa Hall with wonderful chamber music in the first half and "Appalachian Spring" in the second half. I was going to go to sleep, but I was very curious to see how the Assistant Conductor of the BSO, Anna Handler, conducts Copeland. I was super, super impressed. And listening to the first half on the lawn, for the second half listening behind the stage on the balcony, in the hall itself, it's unforgettable.
Of course, this kind of set-up is something that, in Finland, we could only dream of because of the way arts funding traditionally works. And I think also because this is sort of a monument, as I suppose Aspen and Ravinia are, we don't think about orchestral music like this in Finland. And of course the Finnish orchestras are part of the local government or the city where they live, so they need to have summer breaks too. But to get a little glimpse of the history of Tanglewood and to see the orchestra members go in and out of rehearsals, these crazy schedules, unbelievable amount of music... and they're just kind of doing it as if they would do it every day, which I suppose they do. [Kuusisto and McCreath chuckle] It's very inspiring. To get used to playing Sibelius in these temperatures and these levels of humidity is still kind of work in progress, but I'm hoping I'll get there. [McCreath laughs]
Brian McCreath Well, I personally am thrilled that you're here to do Sibelius and to be here for the first time. So Pekka Kuusisto, I so appreciate your time today. Thank you.
Brian McCreath Thank you, and great job with my name, by the way. It's really impressive! [Kuusisto and McCreath laugh]
Brian McCreath Well you coached me well last time! Thank you.
Pekka Kuusisto Thank you.