Sibelius and the Finnish soul

[Neil McGowan]

Tom Service has a piece about six conductors coming to Sibelius afresh.

Sibelius's seven symphonies loom like dark, brooding enigmas over the entire orchestral repertoire. Nearly 90 years after the last was completed – the radical and still influential Seventh in 1924 – they still pose a challenge to orchestras and conductors keen to realise their brave new worlds of sound. There are things in Sibelius's symphonies that music had never done before, new kinds of sounds at the outer limits of orchestral possibility. At one pole of his imagination are the evocations of epic landscapes, as in the unforgettable big tunes at the end of the Second or Fifth. At the other, there's the microscopic detail of his orchestration, the subtlety and shimmer of his string-writing – as if Sibelius had taken the lens of his musical imagination and zoomed in on individual pine needles in the vast forests of his Finnish homeland
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[t-p]

Thanks for interesting article!!!
There is still so much to learn in Sibelius symphonies!!!

I found Karayan conducting in 1960.