The piano remained the main vehicle for the reproduction of classical music until the wide distribution of phonograph records in the 1920s and 1930s, and there's no doubt that the orchestral music of Jean Sibelius would have been played this way. One of the symphonic transcriptions played here by Finnish pianist
Henri Sigfridsson, in fact, dates from 1922.
Sigfridsson released an earlier disc of some of Sibelius' shorter orchestral works in piano versions, and through sheer energy he managed to carry off pieces like Finlandia. The Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43, and especially the Symphony No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 82, are a very tall order to play on the piano, however. The good news is that
Sigfridsson throws himself into the task with the abandon that makes an enterprise of this kind work. He adds material to the Symphony No. 5 transcription and furnishes his own for the Symphony No. 2, puts forth suitable keyboard heroics, and does a remarkable job suggesting orchestral textures with the piano at many junctures. The finale of the Symphony No. 5 has a good deal of its original sweeping energy here. The bad news is that there has seldom been a composer who thought more timbrally than did Sibelius. This is why he was so despised by the avant-garde of the last century, with its pseudo-scientific pretensions so often centered on pitch structures. Without the defining contrasts provided by the orchestra, the music, for all its sound and fury, tends to drag, and this recording, despite superb engineering from the Ondine label, feels like it came from the bottom of the Sibelius barrel.