Thomas Dausgaard’s latest album “Sibelius: Kullervo Symphony Op. 7” was released on 28 June under Hyperion records. With soloists Benjamin Appl and Helena Juntunen, Dausgaard leads a performance that has gained favoured reviews from various sources.
Robert Matthew-Walker gave the album five stars and reported “Dausgaard is magnificent, holding the five movement structure together superbly, inspiring orchestral and vocal forces to compelling musical expression. With excellent sonority, here is early Sibelius – fully authentic and already a genuine master. This is a thrilling and moving musical experience.”
Erica Jeal from The Guardian gave the album four stars and says “Dausgaard has the measure of this music, with its slow, tick-tocking, inextinguishable pulse, its sense of fast movement against vast immobility: a bird skimming low across a Nordic lake. There’s a crackle of excitement every time he shifts up a gear and the orchestral cogs find their groove.”
Ivan Hewitt from The Telegraph has said “The orchestral sound on a new CD recording from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dausgaard, is as sharp and piercing as a Finnish blizzard, shot through at times with tranced beauty.”
In a recent conversation with Andrew Mellor of Gramophone magazine, Dausgaard says “there are moments when we were more inclined to play like folk musicians than like the civilised beauty-creators of a symphony orchestra” in order to capture the symphony’s raw themed content.
