GRAMOPHONE Review: Bernstein Symphonies No. 1 ‘Jeremiah’ & No. 2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’ – Anna Larsson, Roland Pöntinen, Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra/Lindberg

Whenever I listen to the First Symphony I am mindful of how dramatically Bernstein started as he meant to go on – a symphony, a ballet (Fancy Free) and a Broadway musical (On the Town) all feverishly penned in the same year, 1944, like a declaration not so much of independence but of his all-embracing musical personality. Talk about starting as you mean to go on.

Much as I love the ‘Jeremiah’ Symphony, it’s the Second ‘The Age of Anxiety’ that resonates in a deeper place for me. It is the kind of dark night of the soul scenario (after Bernstein’s blessed Auden) that was always going to appeal to the young composer’s philosophical, not to say theatrical, nature. Identification with the urban landscape was one aspect of its appeal. The solitude, creative and otherwise; the sense of change and renewal, spiritual and actual. Antonio Pappano set the bar dramatically high with his Rome orchestra and the virtuosic young keyboard wiz Beatrice Rana in the composer’s centenary year (Warner Classics) – but Christian Lindberg and his unlikely Arctic Philharmonic really ‘get’ the quietudes in the piece – from the Edward Hopperesque duo of lonely clarinets onwards it is a reading which really probes the inky atmosphere of a nocturnal adventure.

The evolutionary nature of the variation form, the constant sense of new beginnings, may be subliminal but it is felt – and there is a motoric imperative about the performance, both from the brilliant Arctic orchestra and Roland Pöntinen’s fiercely percussive playing. He doesn’t convey Rana’s throwaway cool in the dazzling ‘Masque’ section but he is brilliant for sure (as is the jewelled percussion) not least in the jazzy cascades of notes which Bernstein drizzles over the latter part of this highly original episode. The moment of disembodiment when a second piano distances the soloist from himself, as it were, is spot on, too. But it is the poetry of Pöntinen’s playing, the inwardness, that stays with one. Lindberg gave us an impressive On the Waterfront on this label quite recently with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – so naturally he makes a fist of the closing pages (a close relative of that movie score), the long haul to the far horizon and hopeful new beginnings.

Lindberg’s reading of ‘Jeremiah’ gives notice of his keen sense of colour in the contrast between the opening horn oration and the gleaming high woodwinds’ response to it. And it all sounds very handsome, very wide screen, thanks to the usual excellence from the BIS production team. I’m not entirely sure about the markedly deliberate tempo for the middle movement scherzo ‘Profanation’. It serves the lyric counterpoint at the midpoint of the movement well enough but for me it just takes the edge off the excitement despite the blaze of Babylonian trumpets.

Anna Larsson brings her darkest maternal mezzo to bear on the closing movement. It’s the colour of ‘Lamentation’ certainly, despite unintelligible words, and she and Lindberg pull out the requisite emotional charge at the climax.

Much to savour, then. But I’d still go Pappano in both pieces, though there, of course, you get the hat-trick of symphonies on two discs.