My first Sibelius festival was definitely a thrilling experience, much more thrilling than I’d expected. It was the perfect marriage of music, location and venue – the acoustically perfect and architecturally exciting Sibelius Hall (Sibeliustalo) situated on the banks of Lake Vesijärvi, and the performances of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, under their then conductor, the dynamic firebrand, Dalia Stasevska. I was genuinely hooked after that first year. Over the following two Festivals, we had the chance to hear all of Sibelius’ symphonies in fine performances along with most of his major works. With Sibelius, the more you hear his music, the more you hear in his music.

Kullervo was one of the boyish heroes of Kalevala, a joyful extrovert , like Wagner’s Siegfried, who was immensely strong and brave but who was also fated to endure a sorrowful life and to die in despair, after discovering that he had had incestuous love with a woman who turned out to be his long-lost sister.

She wrote about Grieg and Sibelius in a memoir: ‘One particular person for whom I was also able to sing Sibelius was Edvard Grieg. This came about as I presented his Lieder with him on a concert tour to Warsaw. We were together ten days and each day I was supposed to sing Sibelius for him. “He will be one of the greatest men of the North,” Grieg once said to me. Grieg was so enthusiastic that he
promised to visit Finland soon, but several months after our trip he died.’

There was mutual respect between the two most famous Nordic composers even though they never actually met. Their songs are in the repertoire of the international opera star, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila and she came to Lahti for the closing concert when she sang orchestral songs by both composers, Grieg’s songs from Peer Gynt and his well-known En Svane (A swan) and Vǎren (Spring). She closed with a selection of Sibelius’ songs, including the magnificent Svarta rosor (Black Roses). There were no apologies or excuses before she sang, but it became noticeable by the pauses between songs, and then a longer gap as she left the stage, that she was nursing her voice through some kind of infection. She made sure that she could deliver of her best by pacing herself through would could have been an ordeal. It was a masterclass of a great singer’s vocal technique. In Sibelius’ Svarta rosor, she had saved the most difficult and demanding song to the end and she delivered it real passion and drama.

The post Going back to Finland – 2025 Part Two – The Sibelius Festival appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The poem, apparently famous, was new to me and I was immediately drawn to its theme of the, now dead, beautiful love-lorn maiden leaning over the balcony of Heaven hoping that her lover will join her up there where they could continue their very physical relationship. It is a headily exotic piece of mystical eroticism, one of the Pre-Raphaelites classic themes. The young Rossetti is the bereaved young man witnessing what seems like an erotic and slightly irreligious dream of his lost love. This young man’s fantasy drew the piece to the testosterone-charged Claude Debussy who was in his mid-twenties when he wrote his music.   Here are two excepts from the poem to give you some idea of what I mean.

The Blessed Damozel

by Dante Gabriel RossettiThe blessed damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters still’d at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,The Blessed
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.

*

Around her, lovers, newly met
‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves
Their heart-remember’d names;
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bow’d herself and stoop’d
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she lean’d on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

 

I was, of course,  pursuing my slightly obsessive journey through the history of classical music in chronological order from the year 1100 onwards (begun fifteen years ago) and now reaching the year 1887.  Listening to Debussy’s first musical masterpiece, La Damoiselle élue (1887/88), opened my ears to a new era and, maybe for the first time on this project, showed me the dawning of the 20th Century. I have tried over the years to block out memories of any music written after the date currently studied but now that I’m nearing the end of the line (I’m finishing in 1897 with the death of Johannes Brahms), I can’t help but hear how Debussy would flower into one of the early geniuses of ‘modern’ music. It was also a thrilling return to one of my favourite composers, long missed over the 15 years. If you want to see what I mean, you can hear an except from the piece at the bottom of this page,taken from the inspiring CD with Esa Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I can’t stop playing it. It’s true that you can hear the influence of Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883)  and, one of Debussy’s teachers, Cesar Franck (1822 – 1890), as well as sweetly sensuous echoes of music of Jules Massenet (1842 – 1912), especially his opera, Manon (1884), but the intangibly physical mysticism, and the pure sexiness of Debussy’s later work is already here. No wonder his conservatoire teachers warned him “He should be beware of this vague Impressionism which is one of the most dangerous enemies of artistic truth.” How right they were without realising it.

Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918) as a young man

So I have reached the year 1887 and I can feel the earth shift beneath my feet. There are new kids on the block and there’s no denying that this new generation of composers, learning from the past, would change the future of music. Until now, I hadn’t realised that three composers, in particular, all born within a couple of years of each other, formed, almost single-handedly, the voice of the next great period of classical music. They were, of course, Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918), Gustav Mahler (1860  – 1911) and Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949). My listening list for 1887 – 1888 included not only Debussy’s first masterpiece but also Strauss’ first symphonic poem, the wonderfully confident Aus Italien, and Mahler’s exciting Symphony No. 1. Hang onto your seats, music lovers, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

 

Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911) as a young man

 

 

Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) as a young man

So one young man’s poem led me to the work of three more young men but from a very different era – thank you Dante Gabriel Rossetti for your own work but also for inspiring this young French maverick to invent his own way forward. When still a student, he was rebuked for disregarding time honoured compositional traditions. ‘What rule do you follow?’ asked the bemused conservatoire Registrar. ‘My pleasure,’ young Claude replied. It has become our pleasure too. Here is the opening of La Damoiselle élue. Something for the weekend, I suggest.

The post Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel inspires the eroticism of a young Claude Debussy and a new era is born. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The Times ran an article yesterday that might have seemed dull to some but was pure delight to a classical music geek like me. They asked nine different writers to name their favourite numbered symphony – each writer having just one number.  Nine, of course, is the magic symphonic numeral after Beethoven’s monumental canon of symphonies. Schubert wrote nine too – or eight and a half if you feel his Unfinished sounds, well, unfinished. Mahler, neurotic in most things was positively frenzied over the thought that he would die, like Beethoven, after finishing his 9th so he called his real 9th, The Song Of The Earth, a song cycle and then wrote what we call his 9th and, well naturally, he died before finishing his 10th – just like Ludwig Van.

Well, I can’t resist a musical game so I had a go myself and toughened up the rules by saying that you can only have a composer once in your list of nine symphonies. Inevitably things had to go mostly because the greatest symphony composers wrote a lot more than one great symphony and, also, Haydn and Mozart  didn’t get going until they got to double figures but hey, it is only a game.

So here it is, my list of nine symphonies I would never want to live without allowing for the fact that there are a whole lot more out there  as well:

1)  Walton – Symphony No. 1 in B flat minor, Op 11

2)   Elgar – Symphony No. 2 in E flat, Op 63

3)   Beethoven – Symphony No. 3 in E flat Op 55 (Eroica)

4)   Brahms –  Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op 98

5)   Sibelius – Symphony No. 5 in E flat, Op 82

6)   Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op 74 (Pathetique)

7)  Shostakovich – Symphony No. 7 in C, Op 60 (Leningrad)

8)   Schubert – Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D.759 (Unfinished)

9)   Mahler – Symphony No. 9 in D minor

Now it’s your turn – send me your list and we can compare, er, notes.

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