Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Ravel, Salonen, and Sibelius — With Senja Rummukainen

Nordic flavor comes to Cleveland as Esa-Pekka Salonen leads The Cleveland Orchestra in two large-scale Finnish works — including his own Cello Concerto, "a sparkling orchestral outer space where atoms contentedly swirl at random play" (Los Angeles Times) performed by fellow Finn Senja Rummukainen, and Sibelius's rich and rewarding Symphony No. 5, an island of Romanticism written amid the experimental postwar waters of 1919. Also on the program is a favorite work whose orchestral version was completed in that same year: Ravel's haunting Le Tombeau de Couperin, an elegy to his friends lost in the Great War which, despite its genesis, leaves us in an atmosphere of contemplative optimism.

Photo © Minna Hatinen / Finnish National Opera and Ballet