Jean Sibelius: Symphonien Nr.1-7 auf 3 CDs

Product Information

Jean Sibelius the eminent Finnish composer. In a conversation with his biographer, Ernst Tanzberger, Sibelius once said: “My compositions must speak for themselves.”

“ Sibelius’ symphonic cycle is one of the greatest peaks in contemporary music. Along with him come Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nielsen, Vaughan Williams…
His most brilliant individuality attracted to itself and found a response among such different conductors as Damrosch, Muck, Toscanini, Wood, Karajan, Koussevitsky, Weingartner, Ansermet, Furtwдngler, Maazel, Ormandy, Hannikainen…
How splendidly the “wide intervals” sound – the clarinets passing through over two octaves in the Seventh Symphony is a bright example of this. I remember Shostakovich and Mahler, the latter especially for the reason of his “variance of dynamics” – the first clarinet plays forte and the second (two octaves lower) plays piano – a fantastic unterton!
Pauses in Sibelius’ music. Sometimes they last for several measures (the last page of the Fifth Symphony!). These are “mute cries.”
Sibelius’ scores contain a large number of “foresights,” sagacious gazes into the future. In the Finale of the Third Symphony there is a brilliant substitution of one set of instruments with another, which would later be a favorite device of Webern; in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony a most intensely sounding bassoon, playing in the upper register, “indicates” at the dramatic bassoon monologues of Shostakovich; the split rhythmic vertical dimension in the culmination of the Seventh Symphony is closely connected with the “rules” of aleatoric games… ”, – Gennady Rozhdestvensky.