In my view, Berglund certainly deserves to be in that conversation, having devoted much of his career to the music of Sibelius, & especially given his long time obsession with the 7th. With the one exception of Berglund's Bournemouth Symphony 7th for EMI, which was recorded in the 1970s, after Berglund had discovered the numerous errors in the score corrected by Sibelius.įor me, the question of a top choice therefore becomes more about deciding which are the best Sibelius 7ths on record after the arrival of Berglund's new Hansen edition in 1980? or essentially, which are the best Sibelius 7ths of the digital era? Therefore, if you wish to hear Sibelius's corrected score of the 7th, that puts a lot of highly regarded analogue & mono recordings made prior to 1980 off the table & out of contention: such as the 7ths by Karajan-on DG & EMI, Ormandy-on RCA & Columbia/Sony, Bernstein-Columbia/Sony, Beecham, Barbirolli, Koussevitsky, Maazel Vienna, Collins, Gibson 1965, etc. That is when I understood how important it was to make sure that the parts were up to date!"* I noticed that the Philharmonic played from parts that Sibelius had corrected himself, while the Radio Symphony played from parts with the original printing errors. The next year, I conducted it with the Helsinki Philharmonic, and it went better. "I conducted Sibelius' Seventh Symphony with the Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1956, but it didn't really work out. Here's the initial story recounted in Berglund's own words, spoken in an interview with the Finnish Music Quarterly, Nevertheless, the ever self-critical Berglund wasn't happy with the 1980 Hansen edition, either, & kept working to improve it over the years that followed. And, unfortunately, this bad edition turned out to be the one that all conductors, with the exception of Berglund, used to conduct the 7th prior to 1980-when, under Berglund's guidance, the new, revised Hansen edition of the 7th came out, with the original publisher's mistakes corrected. In the other words, the 1st publisher had made a profusion of mistakes or misprints.
#Sibelius symphony 7 full#
After all he was the one that in 1957 discovered that Sibelius's original Hansen edition conducting score of the 7th was still in the possession of the Helsinki Philharmonic, and found that the parts were full of the composer's handwritten corrections. Up until 1980 (& to my mind, well beyond that), no conductor understood the score of the Sibelius 7th better than Paavo Berglund. That depends on which Berglund & Segerstam Sibelius 7ths you've heard?, since Berglund recorded the symphony at least four times, and Segerstam has recorded it at least twice. My favorite is probably the Segerstram but I'd like to know if there are any outstanding ones I'm missing out on." Bz3 writes, "Big fan of this symphony but I only really know Bernstein, Karajan, Ashkenazy, Segerstram, Collins and Berglund.
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