Jean Sibelius

FINLANDIA

This was music that was written for a fundraising concert - on the surface to contribute to a journalists' pension fund but also as a protest against censorship of the Finnish press by the country's Russian rulers.  How a simple and stirring piece called Finland Awakes (with an unforgettable central theme admittedly) ended up astonishing its listeners and becoming Finland's unofficial national anthem is the stuff of legend.  How it ends up as the music that blasts out of the film Die Hard 2 is another thing (but it works!)

It opens darkly - black clouds at the beginning; soon the drama is at hand as the work careers through reflection, jubilance and more militant moods in primary colours.

Bernard Clarke, RTÉ lyric fm

To find out more about Finlandia, go to http://www.sibelius.fi/english/musiikki/ork_finlandia.htm
which is part of a fascinatingly detailed website on Sibelius and his music,
http://www.sibelius.fi/english/index.htm

IF YOU LIKED FINLANDIA . . .

. . . you'll probably also enjoy these concerts in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's 2007/08 season, at the National Concert Hall or broadcast live on RTÉ lyric fm.

Hear Finlandia again with Rachmaninov's breathtaking third piano concerto - pianist Andrei Gavrilov - and more Nordic sounds in Nielsen's Inextinguishable'  symphony.  To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2007/1012/nso.html

The great Sibelius Violin Concerto, soloist Henning Kraggerud, with Stravinsky's Petrouchka and Ligeti's Atmosphères - music made famous in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2007/0921/nso.html

Sibelius's romantic first symphony, with acclaimed English violinist Tasmin Little in the Elgar Violin Concerto and Mozart's Don Giovanni overture.  To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2007/0928/nso.html

Holst's vividly pictorial The Planets, with Vaughan Williams' masterly Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and Thomas Adès' Violin Concerto.  To find out more, go to http://www.rte.ie/performinggroups/2008/0509/nso.html

JEAN SIBELIUS, 1865-1957
Born into a Swedish-speaking family in Russian-ruled Finland, Sibelius was sent to a Finnish-language school and so influenced at an early age by nationalist ideals.  He studied law, briefly, then music in Helsinki and married Aino Järnfelt in 1892; they had six daughters.
In addition to his seven symphonies, he wrote many other orchestral pieces, incidental music for plays, an opera, songs and choral music, the Violin Concerto, chamber music and works for solo piano.  Then, in 1926, he stopped composing almost completely, producing hardly anything for the last thirty years of his life.  In the years since his death and even before it, his music has often been critically unfashionable; it has never been unpopular