Sibelius’s father was a doctor who died in a typhoid epidemic when ‘Janne’ was only two, leaving a pregnant widow and a mountain of debts. Yet besides his uncanny ability to evoke the northern landscape, Sibelius also revelled in the sunlit world of the Mediterranean south, both in reality (large parts of the Second Symphony and Tapiola were composed during visits to Italy) and in his imagination: the symphonic poem The Oceanides was one of several works inspired by the mythology of ancient Greece. These qualities alone are enough to place Sibelius among the ‘greats’. Perhaps no composer has identified so closely with the natural world, nor conveyed its changing moods and atmosphere with deeper mastery and expressive force. He excelled also as a composer of songs and choral music, but since these set mainly Swedish and Finnish texts, they tend to be seldom heard outside the Nordic scene. The same is true of Sibelius’s incidental music for the theatre, a genre in which his touch was peerless. And today’s concert programming does not generally favour the quite short forms of many Sibelius works: ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ and ‘Lemminkainen’s Return’, once familiar, have become less so. Works like the Fourth Symphony, or the symphonic poems The Bard, Tapiola and Luonnotar, present a level of originality and imagination so searching that they still disconcert many listeners.
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