Sibelius Symphonies Jarvi

Internationally acclaimed and Grammy winning conductor Paavo Järvi directs one of the worlds finest orchestra’s, the Orchestre de Paris, in this outstanding collection of all seven of Sibelius’ symphonies. As the music director of Orchestre de Paris (2019-2016), he has performed several works by Sibelius including the seven symphonies. In 2015, he was presented with the Sibelius medal by the Finnish Ambassador to France, Risto Piipponen, for his remarkable work in promoting the music of Sibelius throughout France. Sibelius: Complete Symphonies will be the first ever recording of Sibelius’ complete symphonies by a French orchestra. Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) is recognized as one of the greatest composers of the late Romantic periods. He is the most noted composer of Finland, and his seven symphonies are regularly performed and recorded both in his home country and worldwide.

These discs in the Trio Series present some of the best orchestral music by Jean Sibelius, including "Lemminkäinen suite", "Night Ride and Sunrise", "Pohjola's Daughter," "En Saga," "The Oceanides," and "Tapiola". There are other favorites as well including "Valse Triste," and for some people lesser-known masterworks such as "Luonnotar", "Spring Song", "King Christian", and "The Bard". Sibelius emerges in these woks as a modern and tremendous composer who rarely fails when inspired by literature.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) only began composing symphonies after fleeing the Nazis into American exile in 1941. He was of a generation that saw the symphony as passe Bartok was born in 1881 and Stravinsky in 1882, and Martinu was born in 1890 while Mahler was born in 1860, and Sibelius and Nielsen in 1865. Modernism entailed new forms and styles, and while Martinu was never a modernist he did inhabit a soundworld with a lighter touch full of dance rhythms, not heavy, four-square symphonies.

Paavo Järvi is one of the most successful and distinctive conductors in the international music scene. His recordings of the complete Beethoven and Bruckner symphonies have received rave reviews and are in fact regarded as “reference recordings” (Fono Forum). His current project with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony is again another great symphonic cycle: the six symphonies by Denmark’s most famous composer, Carl Nielsen (1865 – 1931), whose 150th anniversary is celebrated this year…

The beautifully played Sibelius recordings by conductor Leif Segerstam and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra have often been revelatory, not least in the much-neglected area of the composer's theater music. Segerstam found much of interest in the composer's incidental music, the forerunner of the soundtracks Sibelius might well have written if he had lived in our time. But Scaramouche, Op. 71, composed in 1913, is something else again: it is music for a pantomime, a genre not much in evidence for today (although it certainly has affinities with the music video). The action of the mostly wordless play (there were a few spoken passages, excised in this performance) was continuous, and so, thus, was Sibelius' music. It is thus a genuine piece of dramatic music, of which there is very little in the Sibelius catalog, and for the most part it has more to do with the developmental thinking of the symphonies than it does with the incidental music scores.