With its annual Sibelius Festival, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra aims to gather together Sibelius’s friends from all over the world and to offer them a truly memorable weekend in the company of Sibelius’s music.ĬHECK OUT THE SIBELIUS FESTIVAL BROCHURE! SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2023 Sibelius is also Finland’s most famous composer internationally, whose music has won admirers in all parts of the globe. Would you like to make the case for a music genre, or a particular recording artist? Contact the Arts + Culture editor.The position of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) as Finland’s national composer is probably incontestable his significance for the history of Finnish music is unparalleled. Many of us will never see those lands, but in Sibelius, at least we can hear them. Perhaps more than anything, his innovative music is marked by the search for a “pure-sound” - a sound released from its shackles - for which he sought inspiration in the vast lakes, pine trees and wildlife surrounding his home “Ainola” (after his wife Aino) and the Finnish landscape. He battled health problems, including an alcohol addiction, which lead to throat tumours and one scandalously drunken appearance as a conductor of his sixth symphony in Sweden, in 1923. A bon-vivant of sorts, he was also highly self-critical, revising or completely re-writing many works throughout his career. Sibelius composed seven symphonies (and an eighth he destroyed), as well as numerous stage, chamber, choral and piano works, but almost nothing in the final 30 years of his life. His early compositional style was also grounded in the traditional Viennese classicist models of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, but the opposite impulse – a radical, violently-progressive Finnish style captured in the great orchestral works – was by far the strongest and most transformative. Think, for example, of the potent evocation of sexual shame in Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte, (The girl returned from meeting her lover). These works have received comparatively little attention, but it was here that the most traditional aspects of his personality found expression, in their sentimental smoothness and their references to old-world social mores. In the following decade Sibelius’s reputation spread beyond national borders, with performances of his works given across Europe, under the batons of Hans Richter, Weingartner, Toscanini, and Richard Strauss. The work instantly identified him as the musical voice of pro-Finnish-culture activism, and in 1897 the Finnish Senate confirmed his status as a national artist by awarding him an annual pension of 3,000 marks. Haunting modal melodies in obsessively reiterative patterns (adumbrating minimalist and post-minimalist techniques of the 1970s and 80s) are threaded through intense, dark textures and uneasy, jolting rhythmic arrangements, creating within just a few seconds a sound-world unmistakably Finnish and Sibelian. The five-movement work draws elements of programmatic symphonic writing together with soliloquies, dialogues and recitations from the “runes” (poems) of the Kalevala, the national folk epic. During the 1890s he cemented his position as Finland’s leading composer, mostly owing to the 1892 premiere of his massive symphonic poem Kullervo, his first declaration of a mature, self-consciously “modern” aesthetic.
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