The storm inside

Few pieces even by Jean Sibelius open more evocatively. Over gently rolling timpani, muted violin lines begin to undulate and intertwine; flecks of colour from flutes and harps evolve into volatile phrases, the rocking accompaniment quickens and his sumptuously scored marine tone-poem The Oceanides sets forth on the ever more awesome swell of its 10-minute unfolding.

It was commissioned for a pretty swell occasion: the climatic concert of an exclusive music festival in Norfolk, Connecticut, in June 1914, funded by a local Maecenas who not only invited Sibelius as guest of honour on what was to prove his only visit to the US, but who evidently fulfilled the luxury-loving but helplessly improvident composer's every wish. Compared, moreover, with the general bafflement that had greeted his laconic and introverted recent Fourth Symphony (1912), the premiere proved a triumph with the audience, press and, not least the composer himself: "It's as though I had found myself, and more besides," he wrote home to his wife. "The Fourth Symphony was the start. But in this piece there is so much more. There are passages in it that drive me crazy. Such poetry!"

It might seem odd that Sibelius thought of the one work as a continuation of the other, for they could hardly sound more contrasted. Perhaps he meant that finding the authentic form and expression of each had taken an equal amount out of him - the tone-poem, if anything, more than the symphony. But then, given the tortuous complexities of Sibelius's life and character, it seems pretty amazing that he achieved anything substantial at all. Nor was this just a matter of his philandering, heavy reliance on stimulants, debts, the throat-cancer scare of his middle years or the severe disruptions to Finnish life of both the First and Second World Wars.

Some composers can produce only in inspirational spasms; others are more methodical. The real strugglers are those, like Beethoven, who continually ratchet up the compositional stakes for themselves, or those who are radically conflicted in creative character - like Sibelius. By all accounts his was an essentially intuitive temperament. Late in life, his long-suffering wife recalled how fraught family life used to become when he had an important piece boiling up inside him; and how her greatest relief was to hear the scrape of his pen in his study at the dead of night that meant he was at last getting it out on paper.

But no sooner sketched, it seems, than a corrosive process of self-criticism set in; partly a matter of genuine artistic conscience, but compounded, as his fame grew, with an ever increasing concern about what his fellow composers were up to and his own place in musical history. Accordingly, almost every major work became a prolonged crisis in Sibelius's life, as may be studied in his sketches and drafts where available, and still more vividly in the extravagant ups and downs of the published portions of his diaries as he strove with the challenge of "getting it right for Eternity," as he once allegedly remarked. In the end, it would seem he incinerated his long- awaited Eighth Symphony altogether.

At whatever cost, some works none the less came out more or less "right" first time round; the Fourth Symphony required only minor adjustments after its premiere. But not a few - including the early tone poem En Saga (1892/1902) and the Violin Concerto (1903/05) - were withdrawn and virtually recomposed. The most notorious instance was the Fifth Symphony which Sibelius completed in haste for his 50th birthday in 1915, drastically revised the following year, when the first two movements were drawn together in a single span, and again in 1919 - when he even briefly considered doing away altogether with its middle movement and finale!

Some of these original versions, such as those of the First Symphony (1899) and The Bard (1913/14) have since disappeared - as also, except for a single double bass part, has the 1916 version of Symphony No 5. But thanks to the Sibelius Estate and the enterprise of the Swedish label Bis it is nowpossible to compare surviving versions and get inside Sibelius's creative process. To listen backwards, as it were, from the definitive score of the Fifth Symphony to its original version is like entering a vivid and disturbing dream world in which the familiar themes are to be heard drifting around in quite different sequences.

As it approaches the completion of its Sibelius Edition, Bis has turned its attention to the last outstanding tranche of unknown material. Like the Fifth, it transpires, The Oceanides went through three versions. Sibelius's first idea was to cast it in the form of a short orchestral suite in three movements for modest-sized orchestra. Of those, the manuscript pages of the first movement have disappeared, though it is they possibly that became the basis of the revised version of The Bard. Then he worked some of the material into a new single movement, for large orchestra, which he entitled Aallottaret and sent on ahead to the US.

No sooner was it dispatched, however, than he began drastically to recompose the piece again into its final version, The Oceanides, which was what he premiered in 1914. The manuscript of Aallottaret he meanwhile presented to Yale University, where it remained until Osmo Vanska gave its world premiere just three years ago. So the release of all three versions on a single disc opens up some fascinating new perspectives. Of the suite, the surviving middle movement, though characteristic in harmony and scoring, proves to have nothing to do with the subsequent versions, but the finale already pre-figures much of the familiar thematic material. And Aallottaret is startling. Like the Fifth Symphony, it shares material with the final version, but introduced in a different order and juxtaposed with tangy sea imagery that Sibelius cut out of The Oceanides itself. Only in the later stages do the two versions follow a parallel harmonic course - though Aallottaret lacks that sense of slower undertow beneath the swirling surface that adds a sense of increasing depth to the final version; lacks, too, its great double-crested wave of a climax. Where it goes beyond The Oceanides is in the daring nature of its continuity. Dashing from impressionistic texture to pointillistic detail in a perpetual flux, it constitutes perhaps Sibelius's boldest departure from traditional procedures.

It is a pity that Bis recycled a somewhat occluded earlier recording of The Oceanides itself by Vanska and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, instead of getting them to do it again in the clearer sound of the rest of the new disc. But among its other rarities are the first version of a striking tone-poem manqué from 1904 entitled Cassazione and a youthful draft ofSpring Song (1894) that is broader in scope than the neater revision he eventually brought out. What releases such as this serve to raise again are not only such general questions as to what a "work" really constitutes, and whether it can ever be finished or only abandoned. We are also alerted to just what a cauldron of creative and destructive forces seethed beneath the surface of the most seemingly achieved and immutable masterpieces of this unique composer.

'Sibelius: Rondo of the Waves' (The Oceanides, etc) and other works, Bis-CD-1445. Osmo Vanska will be conducting the UK premiere of 'Aallottaret' at the Proms on 18 August