Last Thursday I attended a general rehearsal at the Philharmonie here in
Munich featurin Neeme Jaervi's son Paarvo conducting both Sibelius' and
Bruckner's 7th symphonies.  Wand was supposed to have offiiciated but the
frail octogenarian had to cancel out.  Actually I don't think even Wand
could have done better with the Bruckner.  The Munich Philharmonic simply
took off and played the piece as they were habituated to do under their
late leader, Celibidache.  Jaervi simply had them play through and asked
for no repeats.  The Sibelius was another matter.  You'll recall that it's
really nothing but a stormy fragment of a symphony, taking in all about
20 minutes of playing time.  It starts off tamely and then stormily rushes
on to an ending reminiscent of the beginning.  It's the tempestuous in-
between that was the problem.  It contains passages that seemed to be hell
to play:  concurrent rapid changes in voice leads, tempi, rhythms, a good
part of the time at very moderate volume, the better to expose flubs.
Here Jaervi called for four extended repeats but I couldn't really tell
whether they had really fixed up matters.  I diidn't attend the subsequent
performances but a review , by Richard Brembeck, that appeared in the
Sueddeutsche Zeitung today praised the Bruckner.  The Sibelius, however,
still seemed to have problems--but not the kind I had encountered.  Instead
Brembeck complained about Jaervi's "lack of arresting drive." He seemed to
be wanting to say, as he went on to expound, that Jaervi attended too much
to analysis and too little to charisma.  But now, having heard Sibelius'
7th live for the first time, I'm inclined to doubt that the piece itself is
crafted solidly enough to justify all the moxie that it affects.

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]