il Tempo 21 08 2022

The Chief Conductor of Oslo Philharmonic and Music Director of Orchestre de Paris, Klaus Mäkelä announces his debut album; the complete Sibelius symphonies plus the fragments of the unfinished 8th and his last symphonic poem Tapiola. The orchestra has been performing the music of Jean Sibelius for over 100 years, with the composer himself conducting three concerts of his music in 1921. Together they form the Scandinivian Trio.

When Sibelius conducted the premiere of his Second Symphony in Helsinki on 8 March 1902, it was warmly received as a Finnish nationalist’s cri de cœur while his homeland struggled under Russia’s increasingly repressive yoke. Sibelius objected to such an interpretation of the Symphony, preferring that the work be regarded purely as a symphonic construct. Yet Sibelius’s Second seems to have had an ‘extra-musical’ narrative after all – only not the one of national aspiration long foisted on it. Sibelius’s first concrete idea to become at least part of the Symphony struck him while he was in Italy, with his family, between February and April 1901. While in Rapallo, Sibelius began to fancy that the villa they were staying in was Don Juan’s (the anti-hero he had first encountered through Mozart’s famous opera Don Giovanni). In his diary he wrote a scenario from the anti-hero’s perspective: ‘I was sitting in the dark in my castle when a stranger entered. I asked who he could be again and again – but there was no answer. I tried to make him laugh but he remained silent. At last, the stranger began to sing – then Don Juan knew who it was. It was death.’