Sibelius from Camilla Wicks and Sixten Ehrling

Camilla Wicks and Sixten Ehrling

One of the most famous LPs of the Sibelius Violin Concerto featured a young American soloist who was to make very few recordings, Camilla Wicks (1928-2020). Leading the orchestra in that 1952 Stockholm performance was a young conductor, Sixten Ehrling (1918-2005), who was at the time engaged in recording a cycle of Sibelius symphonies for the same company, Sweden's Metronome Records.

Today's post presents the concerto recording, adding Ehrling's contemporaneous account of Sibelius' Lemminkäinen Suite. A future post will look at some of the conductor's Sibelius symphonies.

Violin Concerto in D minor, op. 47

Camilla Wicks was just 23 when she made this recording, but already was a veteran of the concert stage. Although she was born in California, her father was Norwegian and had changed his name from Varhaugvik to Wicks upon emigrating to the US. Through her tours, Camilla had become particularly popular in Scandinavia, and her interpretation of the Sibelius concerto had reputedly won the approval of the composer himself.

Camilla Wicks

Ehrling, a native of Malmö, had made his public debut as a conductor only a few years before this recording, with the same Stockholm Philharmonic that appears on these records under its broadcasting name, the Stockholm Radio Symphony.

The American Record Guide's Peter Hugh Reed wrote of the recording, "[Wicks'] technical assurance and vibrant tonal quality are backed by musical intelligence and emotion that never degenerates into sentiment ... Mr. Ehrling's conducting has the necessary urgency to an essentially rhapsodic opus; he does not miss the excitement nor the romantic beauties."

The Swedish Metronome company was a small operation, and most of the copies of the LP can be found on Capitol, which licensed the concerto for the US market. The Metronome pressings are highly sought after by collectors; several copies have traded in the $2,000 range. The Capitols are not nearly as pricey, but still can trade for hundreds of dollars. Even so, it's not an especially rare item; I have two copies of it myself.

My two Capitol pressings are from different issues - the first issue (P8175, cover above) and the second issue (P8327), which differed in that it had a green cover (shown at right) and in addition to the concerto included the two best known pieces from Sibelius' Lemminkäinen Suite - the "Swan of Tuonela" and the "Return of Lemminkäinen," also conducted by Ehrling.

These two pieces came from Metronome/Capitol's complete recording of the Suite (which Capitol called the Legends of Lemminkäinen, and which is also called the Four Legends from the Kalevala). The Suite is the second major part of today's post, but first we have a few encores from Camilla Wicks

Two Heifetz Transcriptions

The Sibelius concerto was not Wicks' first recording. The Swedish label Cupol had engaged her to perform a series of short works back in 1948, when she was 19. Today's encores are two of those recordings, both transcriptions by Jascha Heifetz. The first is a Serenade from Borodin's Petite Suite, which would become popular in a few years as "Night of My Nights" in the musical Kismet.

The second encore is another familiar work, Manuel Ponce's "Estrellita," originally a song.

As with the Sibelius, Wicks' performances are faultless. Her accompanist is Kåre Siem.

On YouTube, Wicks can be seen in a vintage performance of Fartein Valen's Violin Concerto and in a film set in Romsdal, Norway, which has an appearance by the violinist (and her mother, pianist Ruby Wicks) in a Grieg Sonata at about 9:20. In later life, Camilla became a much respected violin teacher. She passed away not long ago, in late 2020.

Lemminkäinen Suite, Op. 22

Ehrling recorded the Lemminkäinen Suite with the Stockholm orchestra in December 1953, following his traversal of the seven symphonies. In that year, he had become the music director of the Royal Swedish Opera, where he was to stay until 1960. At that time he was eased out of the post after being reprimanded for what was called his "robust leadership style."

Ehrling then moved to the US and became the Detroit Symphony's music director in 1963, and a frequent guest conductor elsewhere. He died in 2005.

Sixten Ehrling

In the reviews, Ehrling's recording had the misfortune of being compared to the relatively new Ormandy-Philadelphia disc of the Suite. The American Record Guide said of the Stockholm set, "Handsome performances in the authentic tradition, not quite as virtuosic as the ones from Philadelphia but beautifully shaped just the same."

All these recordings were made in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The sound is fairly good for the period. The transfers of the concerto and two of the Lemminkäinen legends come from my collection. The remaining legends and the encores are remastered from lossless originals found on Internet Archive.