Sunday’s BSO concert at Tanglewood featured composers from opposite sides of the globe, Berkeley-born Gabriella Smith and Finland’s Jean Sibelius. The two might not appear to have much in common, but all three pieces on the engaging program — Smith’s Tumblebird Contrails and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 5 — are rooted in nature. The BSO had lined up an ideal pair of Finnish guest artists lined up as well: violinist Pekka Kuusisto and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. Kuusisto’s 1996 recording of the concerto with Leif Segerstam is still among the best, and Salonen has more than a nodding acquaintance with these works: he led Tumblebird Contrails with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the 2023 Nobel Prize Concert, he’s been the accompanist for three excellent recordings of the concerto (Cho-Ling Lin, Joshua Bell, and Hilary Hahn), and he’s programmed the symphony on numerous occasions as well as made a recording.

The bad news Sunday was Salonen’s bowing out for “personal reasons.” The good news was that longtime BSO artistic partner Thomas Adès could substitute on short notice. As a composer himself, Adès is in his element with a work like Tumblebird Contrails. And his fondness for Sibelius is well established; in a note for a 2023 BSO program that included the American premiere of his Air (Homage to Sibelius), Robert Kirzinger observed that when guest-conducting the BSO, Adès has “led music of Sibelius more frequently than that of any composer other than himself.” Seven years ago, almost to the day, he was on the Tanglewood podium for these same two Sibelius pieces, with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist in the concerto; David Weininger’s BMInt review [HERE] cited “revelatory accounts.” 

Smith wrote Tumblebird Contrails on commission from the Pacific Harmony Foundation for the 2014 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music; the piece premiered in August 2014 under Marin Alsop. The title, she says, is “a Kerouac-inspired, nonsense phrase I invented to evoke the sound and feeling of the piece.” It’s not all that nonsensical, however, since she goes on to describe a backpacking visit to Point Reyes during which she watched a pair of ravens playing in the wind, “rolling, swooping, diving, soaring—imagining the ecstasy of wind in the wings—jet trails painting never-ending streaks across the sky.”

That visit to the Pacific prompted Tumblebird Contrails. The 12-minute piece begins as a low ostinato hum, snare drum providing propulsion, the orchestra searching for harmony during what Smith calls “the constant ebb and flow of pitch to pitchless.” Whacks from the timpani establish a kinetic dance rhythm that the cellists tap out on their soundboards. The brass, especially the trombones, wail like gulls and terns; if the ocean could speak, it would excoriate plastic. After some five minutes, the texture thins, the sea sighs, humpback whales call, you can make out waves lapping against the shore, a foghorn, and then a brass chorale starts up, celebrating or, perhaps, warning. Message sent, the ocean resumes its dance.

It would have been interesting to hear Tumblebird Contrails alongside Sibelius’s The Oceanides, the one piece all mood and melody, the other a multilayered cacophony. Adès’s extroverted approach was complementary to the more laid-back one Salonen offered in in Stockholm; he did well by the multiple layers, finding a myriad of details in the deep. As she did in Stockholm, Smith came on stage to give a brief introduction. (There was, of course, a fuller account in the program book.) The work was well received; I do wonder what an audience that didn’t have the backstory would make of it.

Sibelius was an aspiring violinist whose ambition took him as far as an 1891 audition for a temporary position with the Vienna Philharmonic; the jury’s “Not bad” verdict nonetheless coupled included advice to seek a different career. As for his one and only violin concerto, in D minor, it was not a precocious child. He composed it between 1902 and 1904, with the encouragement of German violinist Willy Burmester. The intended March 1904 premiere in Berlin got rescheduled for February in Helsinki, Burmester was unavailable, and the performance, under Sibelius’s baton, was a disaster, the 45-member orchestra undersized and the underprepared soloist, a teacher at the Helsinki Music Institute, not up to the work’s considerable technical demands. Sibelius withdrew the concerto and reworked it, pruning the two outer movements, reducing the technical difficulty, brightening the orchestration. This revised version premiered in Berlin in October 1905, with Richard Strauss on the podium; Burmester was again unavailable, or he may have been passed over in favor of Berlin Royal Court Opera concertmaster Karel Halíř.

The concerto was more positively received on this occasion. All the same, the day after the Berlin concert, the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim deemed it “hideous and boring,” and it wasn’t till Jascha Heifetz recorded the piece in 1935 that it began to gain traction in the repertoire. Donald Tovey facetiously described the finale as “a polonaise for polar bears.” Less famous is his overall conclusion that “I have not met a more original, a more masterly, and a more exhilarating work;” a century later, few would dispute that. The opening Allegro moderato is in sonata form, with three themes, but Sibelius replaces the development with a cadenza for the soloist. He has you guessing right from the start, where the oscillating violins lay a D-minor foundation over which the soloist enters on a dissonant B, and as the first movement evolves through a myriad of keys, it’s hard to tell major from minor.   

Paavo Berglund told us that his fellow Finnish conductor Georg Schnéevoigt “once complained that he couldn’t get the details out of Sibelius’s scores. Sibelius said that he should simply swim in the gravy.” Segerstam suggested one should “surf on the atmosphere.” Perhaps the two ideas amount to the same thing. In any case, Kuusisto and Adès were adept at both swimming and surfing. Kuusisto’s forthright, unaffected “once upon a time” opening drew a brief acknowledgment from Thomas Martin’s solo clarinet. Then he went on to tell his story, with natural, improvisatory phrasing and a mini-cadenza that was a study in light and shade, before sliding effortlessly into the understated anguish of the Largamente second theme. If his tone seemed a little less plush than it did in 1996, it now has more edge and weight and bite. There was certainly no want of bite when Adès and the orchestra entered with the violent irruption of the third theme, one of Sibelius’s rousing Kalevala creations, and no want of paragraphing when they eased out of that theme to set up the development cadenza. Here Kuusisto meditated, clarified, paying due attention to the fermatas. When the orchestra’s transitory D-major climax collapsed, Adès allowed just the slightest pause before the oboes and bassoons emerged to pick up the pieces. The return of the Kalevala third theme released the movement’s demons. For a moment when he wasn’t playing, Kuusisto seemed to be looking out at Tanglewood’s trees for inspiration.               

The second movement’s chastened lament went at a tempo appropriate to Sibelius’s Adagio di molto marking, but it never sagged or grew sentimental. Sibelius didn’t give a different mark to the timpani-driven storm of the middle section; Adès took it faster anyway, making that seem the logical choice, and as in the opening Allegro moderato he let the turmoil subside before Kuusisto re-entered. They maintained a steady, unostentatious line through the lament’s triumphant/tragic climax, Kuusisto then slowly, reluctantly, setting the melody free. For the Allegro ma non tanto finale, he appeared to decide that if the Devil has the best tunes, one might as well play them. Adès tamped down the strings to give him room to rollick; the second theme, suggestive of one from Sibelius’s early tone poem En Saga, saw Tovey’s polars bears romp with heft and grace. Having between them outdanced Old Nick, Kuusisto and Adès were able to make the concerto’s D-major conclusion seem not only well earned but inevitable.          

For his encore, Kuusisto remained in folk-fiddler mode while giving Old Nick a thumbs up. Pirun polska (“Polska for the Devil”) is his adaptation of a Finnish folk tune from the 19^th-century collection of Samuel Rinda-Nickola. He sashayed through the piece with humor as well as virtuosity, finishing with an emphatic foot stomp.

Like the Violin Concerto, Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony also saw substantial revision. He wrote it in 1914 and 1915 as a four-movement work, and he conducted the premiere with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra on December 8, 1915, his 50^th birthday. By January 1916, however, he had become dissatisfied with the piece, and a second version premiered on his 51^st birthday. Eventually that edition too was superseded, and the Fifth as we know it debuted in November 1919, Sibelius again leading the Helsinki Philharmonic. This last version is a clear improvement: Sibelius combined the first two movements from 1915 into an ingenious and original allegro-scherzo and edited the final movement, 679 bars in 1915 and 702 in 1916, down to 482.

The inspiration for the Fifth was the composer’s sighting, in April 1915, of 16 swans that circled over him for a long time and “disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon.” Sibelius was already working on the symphony by then, but he attached his vision to the swinging theme of the finale, which he called the Swan Hymn. He was home at Ainola at the time, surrounded by the forests of Järvenpää and overlooking Lake Tuusula, and the Finnish forest spirit, Tapio, hovers over the Fifth, as it does over the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Sibelius’s last major work, Tapiola (“Tapio’s Realm”).

The initial E-flat horn call rises like the sun, prompting an exchange of cheerful birdsong in the winds and then a general bustling in the strings. There’s a lilt to the 12/8 meter, as if the woodland creatures were looking to learn the minuet; instead, a squabble breaks out in the winds and the strings intervene. This thematic group is revisited under a cloudier sky, and a lone bassoon calls; then the sun breaks through and Sibelius magically transitions into the Allegro moderato of the scherzo section. The flutes gambol, the strings gossip, the tempo imperceptibly increases, the trumpets take up the opening horn call. A ferocious fff timpani initiates the Presto coda, which manages to fly, march, and dance all at the same time.

The 3/2 Andante mosso, in G major, is built on a five-note theme that, initially plucked in the strings, crosses the bar lines. The woodland creatures actually are dancing now, in simple homage to Tapio; the music is agitated one moment and sorrowful the next. The Allegro molto finale, back in E-flat, has ostinato strings rushing this way and that until the Swan Hymn breaks out in the horns over a triumphant descant in the winds. After the typically Sibelian darker reprise, the Swan Hymn seems to come to a standstill and evolve into a higher form of music. The chords of the closing six bars are unique, each beat of music surrounded by multiple beats of space. Sibelius asserted that after he finally put down his pen, “12 white swans settled down on the lake, and then circled the house three times before flying away.”

Sibelius was famously dissatisfied with performances of his works and eventually went so far as to provide metronome marks. Those he created for the Fifth are, in the first two movements at least, faster than the current norm; you have to go back to early Finnish champions like Robert Kajanus and Tauno Hannikainen to hear what he probably intended. Or you could have been fortunate enough to hear Adès’s fire-and-ice Fifth on Sunday. You could follow the score from his dancelike movements on the podium, energetic but never exaggerated. In the third thematic section of the opening Tempo molto moderato, he weighted the spiky woodwind line to a degree I’ve never heard before. Thomas Rolfs’s trumpet solo highlighted the return of the thematic group; Richard Svoboda’s bassoon caught the uneasy mood of the development; Adès conveyed the sense of struggle before the trumpets dispersed the clouds, and then he upped the tempo imperceptibly as the flute duo of Lorna McGhee and Clint Forman tiptoed into the scherzo section, where the chattering winds, darting this way and that, boasted a chamber-orchestra clarity. The Presto that kicks off the coda was a real presto and had the marked fff intensity from timpanist Timothy Genis, whose marcatissimo playing propelled the Piú presto final bars. If the piú ff strings didn’t quite sing out, I didn’t hear them in Andris Nelsons’s fine 2023 BSO/ Symphony Hall performance, either. (They’re exemplary in Paavo Berglund’s 1986 recording with the Helsinki Philharmonic, but perhaps that’s a triumph of engineering.)

Sibelius marked the second movement Andante mosso, quasi allegretto and gave it a metronome mark of 80, which would work out to about eight minutes. Many conductors take nine or more; even 10 can work, as Susanna Mälkki proved with the BSO in 2011. But at around eight — Nelsons in 2023, Adès Sunday — this intermezzo is crisp and light. McGhee and Foreman flitted delicately over the pizzicato strings to begin, and Adès gave full value to Sibelius’s speedings-up and slowings-down, conveying the nervous energy of the former and the uneasy lethargy of the latter. John Ferrillo’s oboe introduced a moment of lamentation, as if nature had become aware of its mortality; Adès responded with a sympathetic ritardando as the winds exited.

The whooshing strings that open the Allegro molto finale suggest Kalevala hero Lemminkäinen racing home like a bat out of hell from the underworld of Tuonela. Soon the swans fly into view, at which point some conductors slow and some accelerate. Adès kept to the same organic, swinging tempo, as if the swans had integrated Lemminkäinen into their wedge; the sun seemed to rise behind them as the music shifted from E-flat into C major. Superbly ppp strings created the Misterioso setting for the swans’ return; Martin’s winsome clarinet suggested uncertainty before the 2/4 key signature changed into 3/2 and the swans took flight. Only the heroic peroration, which Adès took at Sibelius’s Largamente assai, seemed to lose momentum, with the brass pushed to their limit. All was well with the six widely spaced final chords, however, Adès slamming down with both hands on the baton for each one, putting his stamp on an interpretation that was Sibelian to the core.   

Jeffrey Gantz has been writing about music, dance, theater, art, film, and books for the past 45 years, first for the Boston Phoenix and currently for the Boston Globe.