Jean Sibelius has remained my favourite com­pos­er through­out my life. Some­thing in his work touch­es me direct­ly. One of my great­est plea­sures was to attend the unique con­cert series in which all his sym­phonies were per­formed (for the first time) in sequence, under the direc­tion of the young and bril­liant con­duc­tor Thomas Daus­gaard. When I told him, dur­ing the post-per­for­mance recep­tion, that it was the best per­for­mance of the 4th sym­pho­ny (my favourite) I had ever heard, he replied that it was his favourite as well.. giv­ing much the same rea­sons I would have. It is the most dif­fi­cult, and per­haps the least played of the sev­en sym­phonies.… dark, ambigu­ous, com­plex, and intriguing.

This pho­to­graph is by Jousuf Karsh, the Cana­di­an por­trait pho­tog­ra­ph­er who made icon­ic images of Win­ston Churchill, Ernest Hem­ming­way, and many oth­ers. Karsh remem­bered details of the sitting:

“I arrived at Sibelius’s home ‘Ain­o­la,’ named for his wife Aino, laden with gifts from his admir­ers — an inscribed man­u­script from com­pos­er Ralph Vaugh­an Williams, a warm let­ter from Olin Downes, the cel­e­brat­ed music crit­ic of the New York Times, a box of his favorite cig­ars and a bot­tle of old cognac from the Cana­di­an High Com­mis­sion­er in Lon­don. This last we shared with lit­tle Finnish cook­ies and cof­fee. His daugh­ter inter­pret­ed for the straight-backed patri­arch of eighty-four, although there was such a meet­ing of minds that words became scarce­ly nec­es­sary. The struc­ture of his face remind­ed me of carved gran­ite, yet with infi­nite warmth and human­i­ty. This pho­to­graph was one of the last tak­en. He was vis­i­bly moved as I told him how the Finnish work­ers, in their north­ern Cana­di­an log­ging camps, dou­bled their wartime out­put when his Fin­lan­dia was played for them.”

The links go to relat­ed arti­cles on this blog. Some others:

The Kale­vala, is the Finnish epic that inspired much of Sibelius’ music. A youth­ful work of his, Kuller­vo Op.7, is a choral-orches­tral telling of part of the epic. I also dis­cuss it here. En Saga, Op.9 is anoth­er. I have also writ­ten blog items about his string quar­tets, and his first sym­pho­ny.