Jean Sibelius

Conceived in Vienna and completed after he heard the rune singer, it was his first large-scale work sung in Finnish. Its success made him, at twenty-six, the hope of Finnish music overnight.

• In the third movement, ‘Kullervo and His Sister,’ the male chorus recites the story in 5/4 time, counting five beats as a single group. This is thought to reflect the rhythm of the old rune songs in which the Kalevala was chanted.
• Later in the same movement comes the climax of the whole work, when the soprano (the sister) cries out on learning that the man who seduced her is her lost brother. The monologue of the baritone (Kullervo) follows, as if crumbling in its wake.
• In the fifth movement, ‘Kullervo's Death,’ the chorus calmly narrates the hero's end, and the theme from the opening of the first movement returns to close the tragedy.
• Because the composer withdrew the score during his lifetime and the work long lay buried, it is worth comparing the performances that followed Paavo Berglund's first complete recording in 1970.

When he abandoned his Wagnerian opera, the overture that remained became a tone poem depicting the river of death. It is the first work in which his way of rendering myth in orchestral color clearly emerges.

• From beginning to end the swan's song is carried by a single English horn, a woodwind lower and darker than the oboe. This long-breathed solo is counted among the most demanding in the repertoire, even by orchestral players themselves.
• Chords laid down very low and soft by strings divided into many parts sound like a black, still river.
• Listen in the middle for the passage where a solo cello trades brief phrases with the English horn, as if in conversation.
• Near the end the strings strike with the wooden part of the bow (col legno), adding a dry sound to the stillness of the underworld.
• Because Sibelius changed the order of the four pieces, this one stands second or third in the suite, depending on the recording.

A reworking of the final number of his music for a press event that stood against Russian pressure. The Paris World's Fair tour first made his name known to the world.

• In the introduction the brass sound heavy, dark chords, as if bearing down. They are often heard as the atmosphere of an oppressed age.
• In the fast section, the driving rhythms of the timpani and brass sound like a scene of struggle.
• In the middle, the hymn melody sung quietly by the woodwinds later had words set to it and came to be known as the ‘Finlandia Hymn.’ Sibelius insisted that the melody was not borrowed from folk song but of his own making.
• Near the end, don't miss the moment when that hymn melody returns grandly in the brass.

He began the piece in Italy, on a journey paid for with money Carpelan had raised. Audiences heard in it the hopes of a nation, but the composer wished it to be heard without a program, as music itself.

• At the opening of the first movement, the strings repeat a short three-note motif that climbs like steps (ascending) from a low note. This small seed grows throughout the work, changing shape as it goes.
• The second movement begins with two bassoons singing a dark melody over a tread of double basses and cellos plucking the strings with their fingers (pizzicato). In sketches written in Italy he had noted down scenes of Don Juan and Death.
• The fast sections of the third movement alternate with a slow oboe pastoral and then pass without a break straight into the finale; that seam is the glory of the work.
• Near the end of the finale, the brass soar above low strings stubbornly repeating the same figure (ostinato). Kajanus interpreted this passage as the triumph of liberation.

The only concerto by a man who once dreamed of becoming a violinist. After a failed premiere, the revised version came to light in Berlin under the baton of Richard Strauss.

• At the opening, muted violins shimmer very softly, and above them the solo violin enters as if rising to the surface. Many listeners liken it to cold northern air.
• In movement 1, a passage for the soloist alone (the cadenza) stands where the development section would be, and serves as the pillar of the work. It is a rare design for a concerto.
• In movement 3, timpani and low strings drive a dogged dance rhythm. The British musicologist Donald Tovey called it ‘a polonaise for polar bears.’
• With double stops bowed on two strings at once and rapid leaps in succession, it is a notoriously difficult piece. The 1935 recording by Jascha Heifetz and Beecham long stood as something like the benchmark for the work.

A work in which wartime hardship, the celebration of his fiftieth birthday and the experience of sixteen swans overlap. Only after revising it over 4 years did he arrive at its present form.

• Movement 1 begins with a gentle call from the horns. From the middle onward the tempo gradually rises until it melts into a fast dance (a scherzo), the result of fusing two originally separate movements into one during revision.
• Movement 2 rests on string pizzicato (the sound of strings plucked with the fingers), while a simple melody flows on through variations that change its shape little by little.
• In the finale, the theme the horns call out, swinging broadly like bells, is linked to the flight of the swans recorded in his diary. Tovey compared it to Thor swinging his hammer.
• Long silences are wedged between the six chords that close the work. Because the length of the pauses differs from conductor to conductor, it is the passage by which great performances are compared, and it is also famous for drawing premature applause.

His last large-scale orchestral work, written on a New York commission. The forests he had walked since childhood remain as a vast sound grown from a single motif.

• Keep in mind the short motif the strings present at the very beginning. Nearly the whole of the piece, close to 20 minutes long, grows from this one idea.
• At the head of the score stands a four-line poem he attached to it. It tells of the dark forests of the northern land standing wide and dreaming ancient dreams, and of the forest god who dwells within them.
• In the later part, strings repeating a single note so rapidly that it trembles (tremolo) and figures sliding down by semitones surge together, sounding like a storm sweeping through the forest.
• When the storm has passed, a final B major chord, long sustained by the strings, quietly closes the piece.