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Cast
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Hannu Lintu — Conductor
Program notes
Finnish maestro Hannu Lintu presents and conducts the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in all seven bold and unique symphonies by their celebrated compatriot Jean Sibelius!
April 21, 1915. Sibelius writes: “Today at ten to eleven I saw 16 swans. One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon. Their call the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo. The swan-call closer to the trumpet … A low refrain reminiscent of a small child crying. Nature's mysticism and life’s angst! The Fifth Symphony’s finale theme: legato in the trumpets!"
After a Fourth Symphony that responded to twentieth century modernism with daring dissonance, Sibelius seemed to embrace tonality anew in the incontestably expressive and majestic Fifth, one of his crowning achievements: among the work's avowed abstraction, tonality resounds in heart-rending motifs, soaring melodic lines, and the stirring brass choir that bookends the piece, a musical manifestation of the swan sighting that had so moved him months earlier. The work was commissioned by the Finnish government to celebrate the composer’s 50th birthday, marking it as a national holiday, and underwent a couple revisions over the next four years before finding its definitive form in 1919.
