Question for you all: how much does fidelity to the score matter for you in a performance: adherence to tempi, dynamics, rhythmic and ornamental articulation, and transparency? The latter is the toughest question because it often requires subverting the exact score markings.
The reason I ask is because I'm listening to a bunch of Sibelius 5s right now, and different performances do it very differently. Saraste and Salonen basically ignore every score nicety, Lintu is not much better (but then in Sibelius 3 he follows everything...). Ollikainen occasionally follows it. Most faithful of all are of course Vanska and, to my shock, Segerstam. Segerstam follows nearly all of it, he just does it at very slow tempos along with some rubato to capture every nuance. It's a lot... Vanska on the other hand is very streamlined and compressed. Both are extraordinary, but these extremes are why I'm a little unsanguine on being faithful to the score. Another which follows it extremely closely is Kristiina Poska, who perhaps blunts the climaxes a little for clarity's sake, but nails so much of the quiet dynamics, those hundreds of hairpin markings which show how to phrase, and even some of the louder passages. She's a genuine great talent. Blomstedt follows it pretty neatly of course, and it's great, and goddamnit... so is James Levine.
The performance that enrages me is Paavo Berglund in Helsinki. I'm going to commit sacrilege here and say that it's a mostly awful performance. He basically doesn't do any of Sibelius's markings until it's time to make his own interpolations. The interpolations make very good sense, but every place where there aren't any interpolations is monodynamic vanilla: even climaxes pass by with barely an event.
But then there are those who engage the score without following it slavishly. Dalia Stasevska in Frankfurt follows quite a bit, particularly of course in the loud parts and interprets the 'moderato' at that climactic B-major halfway point at half the speed of everybody else, it's shocking but it's a perfectly legitimate interpretation. But she also does all sorts of things contravening the score that make the performance truer to her more romantic spirit. Of the more unsubtle maestri of today, Stasevska is quickly becoming a favorite: she begins to remind me of John Barbirolli. Thomas Sondergard, on the other hand, a gentler, subtler sort of conductor, follows everything on the piano end and generally blunts a lot of the climaxes for the sake of clarity: the soft passages are truly breathtaking.
But then there's my dear Paavo Jarvi, who follows most of it, then disregards it when it's time for one of his magnificent rubato flourishes, which are never dramatic departures, and to clarify moments like the climax of the first movement. To me, this is what real mastery is. It finds the golden section between fidelity and individuality, and balances the difference between them. For great musicianship to continue, generation to generation, for perhaps classical music to continue itself, this is what we need: for musicians to express themselves, but not impose themselves. That's what's done in a real culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrBCSAlWcl0
Colin Davis does what a great artist does. It's not that he doesn't follow the score, but like a lot of the greats, he 'simplifies' it. Realistically speaking, if you want a performance to take wing, if you want the players to act as though possessed, they can't worry about every single instruction. You preserve the macro ones, where a score calls for extended pianissisimo or fortissisimo, it damn well means it, in between, you vaguely get them to phrase the way Sibelius notates, but then you leave the rest to the moment's impulse. Would I ideally like the general tone of the first movement to be a little quieter? Would I ideally like those weird horn syncopations to be more raucous? Sure, but when the whole thing is done with the freshness and conviction of the Boston Symphony, who should complain? Davis used to say 'you don't follow the score, you follow the music.' There are moments when I recalled that adage and thought it just a byword for laziness, but then Davis gives a performance like this granitic monument to Sibelius's art.
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