VA - Sibelius: Great Performances (2015)

Sibelius thought in terms of orchestral sonorities, not in those of the smaller-scale keyboard. He used an existing vocabulary, but in so highly idiosyncratic a manner that no attempt to imitate it can succeed. Indeed, as Vaughan Williams put it in a ninetieth birthday BBC tribute that I remember hearing, he had the capacity to make a C major chord sound entirely new. Take, for example, the D minor-cum-modal cadence that ends the Sixth Symphony or the haunting B minor chords that end Tapiola. They sound like no other composer. In his constant renewal of his musical material, Sibelius almost prompts an astronomical analogy; that of continuous creation . Professor Gerald Abraham spoke of the first movement of the Third Symphony as comparable only with the greatest Viennese masters in its mastery of form. Indeed, it is his feeling for form and proportion that never fails to astonish. Yet what Sibelius has to say is intimately related to the atmosphere and sensibility of northern Europe just as, say, Mussorgsky relates to the Russian ethos. And in these deep roots in his native environment lies his strength.
When Sibelius was born in 1865, Finland was a provincial backwater of the Tsarist empire and his birthplace a garrison town for its army. There was no permanent symphony orchestra and no opera house. When he died ninety-one years later, Finland was an independent country on the threshold of prosperity after having been drawn into two world wars, its national identity closely defined by Sibelius s own achievements, with fine orchestras in Helsinki and Turku (Åbo) and the foundations laid for a flourishing opera. Sibelius had become widely celebrated and renowned, Finland s voice in the world. Among twentieth-century masters, the quietism of the Sixth Symphony or the profoundly searching anguish of Tapiola has no real parallel.
Robert Layton