This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” in this season of bitter temperatures and falling snow, keep your spirits up with music inspired by Finland’s avian life.

Einojuhani Rautavaara’s concerto for birdsong and orchestra, “Cantus Arcticus,” from 1972, incorporates tape recordings made by the composer on the bogs of Liminka, near the Arctic Circle. More than just a gimmick, the piece is an inspiring triptych that manages to transcend its potentially New Age conceit. The work falls into three movements: “The Bog,” “Melancholy,” and “Swans Migrating.” The final movement takes the form of a long crescendo for orchestra, and incorporates the songs of whooper swans.

Jean Sibelius’ uplifting Symphony No. 5 culminates in a grand theme inspired by swans in flight around his home on the shores of Lake Tuusula in Järvenpää. The symphony is standard repertoire, but we’ll hear it as it was first performed in 1915, before it was substantially revised to become the masterwork we know today.

Encountering the Fifth in its original guise illuminates the composer’s remarkable clarity of purpose, uncanny objectivity, and iron will in reshaping his raw materials to achieve a loftier, definitive vision. It’s not for nothing that Sibelius was described by one critic as “a great artist whose imagination has the wings of an eagle.”

Take flight with Finnish music. Join me for “Snow Birds,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.