Lorin Maazel's Sibelius cycle is recorded in such a way that there are two essential poles of signification: the right channel and the left. This is, obviously, the way in which every album since the invention of stereo has been recorded, but it is more significant in the Maazel just by way of its polarisation. It is, I suppose, what Mercury used to call "living stereo" but instead of a gimmick it actually does feel like a living stereo. This is part-Maazel and part-Sibelius, for Sibelius' symphonies are not ever content to reproduce a homogeneous romanticism. The textural play of a symphony by Rachmaninov, Beethoven, even Glazunov or Mayer as master orchestrators, I would call diachronic. When the music signals texture the entire orchestra responds, and the music is structured on the periodisation of such textures--the division of labour in a Sibelius symphony is more metropolitan, in the sense that it poetically evokes the living spaces of people and that it represents a disjunction in that space of its time. The brooding swells of the first symphony, for example, are not played as an orchestral movement but as a substrate--the string section is a "relatively autonomous" level of the whole, seemingly unbothered by the other levels of the music but of course determined by them in the last instance when it all collides together in the coda. Even moreso in the sixth, where the heterogeneity of all the levels of the orchestra play as relatively autonomous layers in the construction of a moment of music that feels like a living organism, a city; orchestral architecture. Their determining principle is of course the tonality of the piece: Sibelius was, although I think about as modernist as a romantic can get without approaching Prokofievian aesthetics, a tonal composer, and this was his unity. Like the unity of space, the problems of his symphonies are never posed away from a measurable distance of their solutions: this is the principle of urban planning too insofar as it is the construction of space. All those little molecules of sound in the sixth evoke a spatially-bound community in their difference: the Lefebvrian right to the symphony.

This is what makes the mixing of Maazel's cycle so fascinating, because when the right side of the orchestra is playing, it is prioritised entirely in the right channel and vice-versa. It makes it sound "alive", because we are treated to a constant stereoscopic circling of the orchestra. Stereoscopy, however, is at base illusory, and what is really happening in the mix is the pre-determining of a certain section of the city-symphony being districted off and mapped for the listener before any possible means of intervention, based on what I can only assume to be assumed biases. The "primary" melodic lines of each section are what we hear in one ear--or rather the fact we are hearing them louder in one ear is what determines the assumption of their primacy--and in the other ear are what in a symphony by Rachmaninov or Beethoven or Glazunov or Mayer would be simply harmonic residues. In Sibelius, however, these parts are no less important than, to use a term I loathe, the central "tunes" of each piece. In Maazel, there is an absolute clarity at all times that is distributed unevenly across the two poles of his mix. The relations of the production of the music are even accelerated by way of his relatively extreme tempi, allowing the epistemological construction of the "tunes" to occur on a much quicker timescale. It is, ultimately, a pre-determined form of living. We hear the symphonies through a kind of syntactic mesh in that we are told that their language is their absolute melodisation: the two poles of the mix become, effectively, call-and-response between two speakers (in both senses of the word) who are reduced to just one by the time the coda folds them together.

This makes for a melodically rich listening experience, of course, and its actual sensuous effect is rather novel and rather beautiful. However, the bouncing back-and-forth of only primary melodies in symphonies we have established to be polyvocal is a bit strange. Cities tend to have a population larger than 1. The conversations that occur in the background are, because Sibelius was a phenomenal composer no matter the cycle we are listening to, absolutely worth integrating properly into the mix. It may make the listening experience a little more murky, but Sibelius' music is at its best when it is on the cusp of sounding indeterminate; his ability to pull it back to the centre of the space he constructs is his biggest strength.

Kamu offers a wonderful perspective for this problem. He conducts from an "analytic" or "micro-managing" point of view, and these terms are usually implied to his detriment. It is mostly just a matter of perspective: those who profess Sibelius as a romantic will have the music romanticised before it even begins. The romantic symphony is essentially the reflection of an affection of the sublime:

The everlasting universe of things 
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves 
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom 
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs 
The source of human thought its tribute brings

Through Shelley we can find the purpose of the diachronic monotexture: the sonoristic "everlasting universe". Of course, such a ridiculous heterogeneity is impossible to depict within just one poem or symphony--part of the experience of the sublime, as Burke tells us, is the paradox of being unable to denote the sublime itself. The absence--Deleuze's infinite regression--lends itself to a kind of fear, then admiration, which is the essential thing that is significatory, yet it is still just a name: "Mont Blanc". Being the cultural revolution that it was (and political revolution vis a vis Napoleon), romanticism seems to have survived as the primary mode of interpreting art into the present insofar as what is often prized in a piece of music is its affectual capacity. The now decades-long obsession with vibrato, both in its most fervent rejecters like Roger Norrington and violent soldiers like Dave Hurwitz, stages itself as a historical drama but mostly comes down to the singular point of what vibrato evokes emotionally. The former suggests that playing Haydn with lots of vibrato is anachronistic, the latter (with semi-spurious investigations into old scores) that not only is this not the case but that it indeed sounds better because vibrato opens up the emotional range of a piece. The teleology here is of course that both are attempting to reach some kind of sublimity*, either of intonation or "gorgeousness" (Hurwitz loves to use this phrase without ever explaining what he means by it). The chief anachronism, then, is the attempt to link all music to this sublimity; regardless of how it is arrived at that point, the music is always-already sublime. The methods of excavating that pre-conceived reality from its conceptual mesh (intonation/beauty) are relatively interchangeable. There emanates from romanticist readings of music the idea that, in a literal sense, "the source of human thought its tribute brings": there is no end to the people who will claim that the enjoyment of classical music makes one inherently more intelligent, purely because the "thought" has apparently already been constructed in the music. One need only listen to it.

Despite this, a romanticist reading of romantic art is surely not the crime of the century. Yet, I am always drawn to these lines of Charlotte Smith:

On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! 
That o'er the channel reared, half way at sea 
The mariner at early morning hails, 
I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, 
And represent the strange and awful hour 
Of vast concussion

There is a wonderfully vicious casualness here, in the sense that Smith constructs a space where subjectivity is the property of both herself and the sublime, and even as she witnesses a "strange and awful hour"--Britain's war with France--she is able to recline atop it. She is at an essential distance from "Fancy", affectivity, and while she is at rest on the sublime its representations exist solely at a distance from her body. She is an observer rather than an object of its affects. Submission to the latter is a "vast concussion" and if I were feeling particularly cruel I would suggest the same affliction in our romanticists.

Indeed, it does take a certain concussive force for all the concepts and sub-concepts of a recording to be homogenised into a singular teleology of beauty. Kamu, then, takes a view of Sibelius similar to Smith's of sublimity. His "analytics" are much like Smith's insofar as she was a natural historian: in this recording no stone is left unturned, not because it might contribute to the emotionality of some whole but simply because it aids the mechanical construction of the piece. As mechanism, the record in general presents an interesting reality: that of a surface on which music has been inscribed--two live performances of the same piece are, I think, two different musics become noumenal once finished. N recordings of that music are just N different inscriptions of that music and have a multiplicity of resonances determined by microphone quality, position of people in the room, their breathing patterns. N listening sessions of a record are still N different sensory experiences but they are experiences of the same recorded object which has a materiality beyond that which the listener's perception produces. It exists independently of any review, regardless of whether N reviews are gleaning N different things from the record. The subjective/objective dichotomy common to colloquial music discussion is constructed in that basic materialism: the former is simply N+1 for every different subject observing the record. N is, in the last instance, not reducible to the recording itself. This is simply because the record is irreducible. Constructing out of it a whole which is beautiful from every angle does it a disservice, does music a disservice if we are to say that in every piece of ("good") music is an identical essence. Critics of Kamu have suggested essentially the opposite of this, that his microscopic detailing is an unnecessary intervention into the whole. Maazel's approach is itself intermediary insofar as it exists between two poles, but they are always folded back into one. In a sense, romanticist listeners of Sibelius have already constructed the space for the music before they figure themselves as a part of it. As a sublime object, the music is figured to pre-suppose the listener who is expected to, out of proper etiquette for the inherent intelligence contained within it as a classical piece, approach with fear and admiration. Kamu, however, is well aware of his position within this space. Indeed, he is hyper-aware that it is he who is constructing it: in the sublime space, its apparent pre-supposition of the subject is purely in the imagination of the subject. Beyond shadows on the cave wall, the romantic listener creates their own shadow and then forgets that they ever did.

Does this make Kamu Plato? Not exactly. However if we are approaching music at the level of analytics, the question is thus: does music produce sound, or sound produce music? The former seems relatively obvious: of course music produces sound, but at what point can we conceptualise that sound as music? I think I would put it roughly like this: not all sound is music, but music is composed of instances of sound that congeal into the concept Music when constellationised into subconcepts--pitch, tempo, melody, harmony; "organised sound" à la Varese. Here we have an abstract (individual sounds), concrete (musical subconcepts) and synthesis: Music. In all of this positivity, though, what happens to those individual sounds? In a recording, of course, each sound that occurs has an individual resonance that is immutable--even in a work like Ryoji Ikeda's Matrix that encourages the listener to move around the room to experience changes in resonance, the recording doesn't; it produces something akin to an optical illusion. The cover of Animal Collective's Merriwether is not actually moving. A reduction to the resonance of the individual note of course has a Cageian aspect, and there are many instances where my enjoyment of a piece of music is heightened by the way a single particular sound resonates through my ear, regardless of the music it is surrounded by. Yet, the music is constructed out of these particular sounds and the sounds could not be particularised in this way if not for the music they are surrounded by. This is an essentially unresovable tension (negativity!) that, I think, comes to be mediated in each record by how the resonances of each sound are handled. I of course mean by this the processes of producing, mixing and mastering music. The choices made in engineering a recording is what allows each individual sound to have meaning beyond that which it assumes in its constellation of musical subconcepts. Of course, if we are to negativise this dialectic properly, we need to account for the fact that the terms employed in engineering a recording are themselves musical subconcepts, and we cannot shut down the constellational flow by turning the valve off at the exclusively compositional point. The mediation of resonance is equally important as the composition of the music itself, where recordings are concerned.

This is why what Kamu does is so impressive: he integrates both poles of Maazel's biases into one--not one as in an already-constructed whole, but one as in a single piece defined by its internal difference. In this recording we hear not just the surface rhythms of the city-symphony but all of its background conversations: they all speak to one entity in the last instance, the music, but they speak the one insofar as the one is difference itself. This is a complex thing to listen to, of course, and indeed makes Kamu come across as cold or un-emotional, but only if you conceive the one as expressing only one quality: "beauty". There is as much coldness in this music as warmth, as much beauty as ugliness, but his conducting does not exclude the negative of each attribute because he understands that it is all fundamentally part of the same space. His expression of this is perhaps the least romantic way to play a symphony, granted, but in doing so he constructs romanticism from the inside-out and thus gives it more reality. In this situation if he is not Plato then he is rather Spinoza: "the city that is rationally conceived and constructed through the daily activity of its members is indeed a collective individuality, bound together by the affects of friendship, morality and religion, but it is not founded on uniformity. Thus it is the means by which each person can affirm and strengthen their own individuality". The city-symphony finds meaning not in its emotional whole but in the collective individuality of its singularities, as they find their assignations in the structure. This is not a process without antagonism, but the structure is mutually understood to neutralise antagonisms by declaration of their freedom to exist in the first place. If this means that the music is sometimes affronted by a coldness, or a mechanistic process where something purely and intuitively emotional should exist, it is only because Kamu's interpretation allows those elements to freely express themselves: as they make contact with the other elements of the symphony's body, they continually refract and generate a collective meaning that is far more complex than the reifications of romanticism.

It isn't just that cities tend to have a population larger than 1: it is that they wouldn't be cities if they didn't. Composite bodies drawing lines of affection into and out of each other, across a plane of differentiation. It would be hard to say that this is Sibelius, because there is no other interpretation of his music that sounds like this. Yet, who do we afford primacy to in this circumstance? Kamu is the interpreter, but Sibelius wrote all of these notes on the paper himself, after all. There must have been a differential kernel that has always been visible on the page, but the romantic vision necessarily includes a blindness to the differential. Insofar as the writer is the first reader of their own work, Sibelius certainly saw.

- J. Wiegold, September 2025