Maxim Vengerov is the biggest name to visit New Zealand in 2024. A global superstar since his early 20s, Vengerov plays Sibelius with Auckland Philharmonia on 22 August. David Larson explores the links between Sibelius and Aotearoa.
“It is really a sensual experience. One is literally carried away... zooming in over magnificent mountains and farmlands, held up by nothing but Sibelius... I emerged feeling quite proud of my country.”
That’s Marilyn Duckworth in 1971, giving a representative home-town review of This is New Zealand, a multiscreen promotional film made for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka and viewed by millions of people globally. The brief excerpt from the Karelia Suite, which underscores the aerial vistas of the opening minutes, is only one of the film’s many music cues, but it left a large cultural footprint. The passage is a million miles from the sombre brutality of Finlandia’s opening horn snarls, or the oceanic surges and jagged accents of the violin concerto. It’s Sibelius marching to victory, inexorable, four-square, exultant. As an accompaniment to those “magnificent mountains and farmlands”, it feels like a patriotic expansion of the film’s title: This is New Zealand, be astonished. In its wake, through the 70s and even into the 80s, you could detect a sense of understated Kiwi ownership towards any given Sibelius piece the Concert Programme cared to feature: one might concede if pressed that this music was Scandinavian to its bones, but its local meaning had become Duckworth’s one. It said that we were allowed to feel proud of our country.
Bernstein’s great half-truth, “Music is never about anything, music just is,” flips to a half-lie when applied to Sibelius. His music so often seems to be about things. He first rode to fame on the back of a decade’s worth of tone poems, music explicitly written to express thematic ideas or stories, most of them tied to Finnish nationalism. Like most well-to-do Finns born in the 19th century, he had to learn Finnish as a second language, having grown up speaking the Swedish of his now Russian-owned province’s former rulers. He became one of the great cultural champions of the Finnish independence movement, and his early works were received as expressions of Finnish identity, not least because he wrote them with that in mind. Finlandia, composed as part of a protest against Tsarist censorship (and performed by Auckland Phil on 22 August), became so popular that as it spread around the not-yet-country, it had to be performed under a range of made-up names, to hide the fact it had been programmed until it was too late for the local Russian overseers to shut down the concert.
National identity – if not nationalist pride – was, of course, a key theme in the early works of our own Douglas Lilburn, the closest thing Aotearoa has produced to a Sibelius. Lilburn’s assertion of a New Zealand musical language echoed Sibelius’s from the other side of the world. But if anyone asked, in the wake of This is New Zealand’s popularity at the Osaka Expo, why Liburn had not been used on the soundtrack, I can find no record of it. Instead, we basked in the warm glow of association with greatness: the world had glanced at us and smiled, and we were happy. Oh yes, this was New Zealand.
And yet the Kiwi cultural cringe does give us a distant claim to the music that fanned the fires of Finnish independence. The difficult tribal emotions that helped spark some of Sibelius’s most popular works belong to us as much as to anyone. Though if we’re wise, even as we glory in the music, we won’t take pride in that.