Sibelius Symphony 7

A true specialist of his fellow countryman Jean Sibelius’ music, Paavo Berglund recorded no less than three complete symphony cycles for EMI/Finlandia! That makes him the most devoted Sibelius conductor of the whole discography. The first symphony Berglund ever put on record was Sibelius’ seventh, his musical testament and a pure concentrate of his musical genius. It is made available in a brand-new audio cut, and coupled with other late masterpieces such as Tapiola or The Oceanides.

Conductor Nicholas Collon began as the new Chief Conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in September 2021. This all-Sibelius programme, carefully selected by the conductor, is his debut album together with his new orchestra. Collon offers fresh and modern interpretation of Sibelius’ symphonic testament, the 7th Symphony, and brings to life the colour and drama of Sibelius’ incidental music for two plays – Maeterlinck’s famous Pelléas et Mélisande and the historic King Christian II.

Sibelius's Symphony No.3 was composed in 1907. It is the link between the romantic intensity of his first two symphonies and the more cold complexity of his later symphonies. Symphony No.7 was completed in 1924 and is notable for having only one movement. The Swan of Tuonela is a tone poem based on the Kalevala epic of Finnish mythology. The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra and Yevgeny Mravinsky pair these with Debussy's Nocturnes Nos.1 & 2.

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.’

Conductor Nicholas Collon’s second Sibelius album together with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra focuses on works written by Sibelius during or just before World War I, and culminating in the 5th Symphony, one of the composer’s symphonic key works. Two opuses for violin and orchestra, Two Serenades and Two Serious Melodies, one of Sibelius’ most religious works, are featuring star violinist Christian Tetzlaff. Sibelius’ music for Strindberg’s Symbolistic play Swanwhite is a rarely performed gem with interesting thematic connections to other works included on this album, including the 5th Symphony.