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Tag: Finnish Music

Lost Sibelius Overture Rediscovered & Performed

We’re only a few hours away from the first modern performance of a long-lost work of Jean Sibelius.

News of the 2019 rediscovery of the score of this “Concert Overture” (found with the manuscript of Sibelius’ only completed opera, “The Maiden in the Tower”) somehow eluded my notice. The overture was last performed in 1900. This is not to be confused with either the Concert Overture in E (1891) or the Concert Overture in A minor (1902), both recorded by Neeme Järvi and others.

You can watch a performance of the “new” work live on the YouTube channel of the Avanti! kamariorkesteri / Avanti! Chamber Orchestra today at 12 pm EDT:

Or wait for the video to be posted on May 30. Learn more about it here:

Avanti! conducted by Tuomas Hannikainen resurrects Sibelius work dormant for 120 years

The complete concert program will feature two more Sibelius rarities – the melodrama “The Countess’ Portrait” and a suite from “Belshazzar’s Feast” – as well as André Caplet’s “Conte fantastique” for harp and string orchestra, after Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

News of the rediscovery in 2019:

Concert Overture by Sibelius rediscovered

The Concert Overture in E major (1891)

The Concert Overture in A minor (1902)

An earlier attempt at a grand opera, “The Building of the Boat,“ was abandoned in 1893, though much of the material was reworked by the composer into “Four Legends from the Kalevala” and the symphonic poem “The Wood Nymph.” One of his most frequently-programmed pieces, “The Swan of Tuonela,” was originally planned as the prelude to this opera.

UPDATE: Having just watched the modern premiere, here’s my assessment. The overture won’t change anyone’s fundamental understanding of Sibelius, but it is by turns evocative, dramatic, charming, exciting, and beautiful. If you’re a fan of the “Lemminkäinen” symphonic poems, I think you will enjoy this. A magical treat, and at 12 minutes, not an insignificant one. I’ll be checking back for the full concert on May 30. Just what I needed on a 90-degree day. Thank you, Avanti!

UPDATE #2: The performance of the overture is now posted.

May 26, 2021
Finnish Birdsong Music This Sunday

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.

January 31, 2021
Sibelius at 155 A Finnish Hero’s Legacy

EIGHT DAYS OF SIBELIUS – DAY 8

Well, today is the day. The 155th anniversary of the birth of Jean Sibelius.

The Sibelius legacy is an interesting one. In Finland, he is regarded as a national hero – so much more than a composer – since essentially, he provided the soundtrack for Finnish independence. His image has adorned statues, stamps, and currency. Finnish Flag Day is even celebrated on his birthday (December 8).

Outside of Finland, Sibelius’ reputation has been a little spottier, his path to the pantheon a bit more circuitous. Broadly speaking, he has fared better in England and the Commonwealth, the United States and, naturally, Scandinavia. In Germany and France, much less so. In the modernist era, his music became regarded in some circles as a hopeless throwback. Here was a tonal composer who, in his naiveté, still wrote tunes! René Leibowitz went so far as to call him “the worst composer in the world.”

There are still some who remain deaf to Sibelius’ charms, and blind to his significance. But in his way, he was every bit as innovative – and every bit as subversive – as Stravinsky or Schoenberg. Like Franz Liszt before him, the great Finn blazed his own trail, rejecting forms that had been developed over generations, particularly those of German origin, to reinvent the symphony, in a manner that would become recognized as wholly characteristic of the North.

Few composers’ music has been so tied-up with the spirit of their homeland. Sibelius came of age at a time when artists of the “provincial” countries of Europe began to chafe against imperial domination, and to assert their own national identities. Sibelius loved Finland. He loved its history. He certainly loved its natural beauty.

All this is reflected in his most famous piece, the tone poem “Finlandia,” his most flagrant expression of Finnish patriotism, performed under many names in its early days, in order to circumvent the Russian censors. The work was first heard in Helsinki on July 2, 1900. The conductor on that occasion was Sibelius’ good friend Robert Kajanus.

YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO WATCH THIS EXCEPTIONAL VIDEO! “Finlandia” is given a stirring presentation, complemented by Northern Lights, imposing forests, and stunning wildlife footage. I guarantee it will be nine minutes of your day well-spent. An inspiring visual interpretation that breathes new life into an overplayed favorite.

The serene melody at the heart of “Finlandia” is often heard separately as the “Finlandia Hymn.” Though not the Finnish national anthem, it is basically the Finnish national song. Listen to this lovely performance, recorded in November, by the Sibelius High School Chamber Choir. In this case, social distancing need not mean isolation.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEAN SIBELIUS!

PHOTO: “Passio Musicae” (1967) by Eila Hiltunen, the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki

December 8, 2020
Sibelius’s Symphony No 5 Day 4 of 8

EIGHT DAYS OF SIBELIUS – DAY 4

With his 50th birthday imminent, Jean Sibelius received a commission from the Finnish government to write a brand-new symphony. The Symphony No. 5 was given its world premiere in 1915, with the composer conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic – though the original version was quite different, in many respects, from the masterwork we know today. In a remarkable feat of objectivity, Sibelius extensively revised his symphony twice, in 1916 and then again in 1919.

One of the work’s major innovations (showing the influence of Liszt, whom Sibelius greatly admired) involved the elimination of the break between the first two movements of the original four-movement structure. The demarcations are blurred so that the first movement now slips inexorably into a scherzo, and the listener is swept along, as if caught up in a powerful current, or precipitated into a sublime avalanche, to thrilling effect.

The transition has always been a challenge for conductors, since this sneaking accelerando should feel as if it’s completely organic. It has to unfurl naturally. Sibelius would further experiment with the telescoping of movements and the subversion of classical expectations in his Symphony No. 7.

Perhaps the most striking revision is in how the final movement builds to a climax of impressive grandeur, a sublime apotheosis of its ennobling “swan theme,” only to come up against a series of powerful, monolithic chords, each isolated from the next by a moment of silence. The first five serve to suspend the effect. The sixth falls, like Thor’s hammer, with an indisputable sense of finality. Truly, this is music of the gods.

The Sibelius 5th is among the noblest in the entire literature. I have long regarded it as my favorite symphony.

Herbert von Karajan conducts the 5th Symphony:

Osmo Vänskä conducts the original 1915 version!

December 4, 2020
Sibelius’ Lost Symphony The Mystery of Ainola

For the last 30 years of his life, Jean Sibelius was gripped by what became known as “The Silence from Järvenpää.” Järvenpää is the name of the Finnish market town outside of which the composer made his home. He called that home Ainola, after his wife, Aino, who in turn was named for a character in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.

After the completion of the Symphony No. 7 and the tone poem “Tapiola” in the mid-1920s, Sibelius created no further major works. Or did he? He was known to have grappled with the composition of an eighth symphony, the manuscript of which he is said to have destroyed. I heard as much from the mouth of his own grandson, who claimed to have been present at its burning.

However a few tantalizing sketches emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, in 2011. Is it possible that more may have survived? Perhaps somewhere, among the composer’s papers, a draft could even exist. I’m not in favor of reconstruction from mere fragments, but if there is a somewhat complete version of the symphony, even in embryonic form, I would be very interested to hear it.

It makes my heart ache to listen to these sketches and contemplate that there might actually have been another Sibelius symphony, had the composer only been able to conquer his demons and hold it together one more time.

December 8, 2019

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