London Symphony Orchestra Spring 2021

1 Allegro molto moderato
2 Allegretto moderato
3 Poco vivace
4 Allegro molto

Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony has a strangely two-sided reputation. For many Sibelius devotees it is simply one of the most beautiful and original things he ever wrote; and yet it has never been anywhere near as popular as its magnificent neighbours, the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies. Perhaps the problem is that listeners have tended to approach it with the wrong expectations.

In fact the Sixth Symphony doesn’t really behave like any of the other symphonies. The musical landscape is unmistakably Sibelian: luminous writing for the strings, woodwind birdcalls, rock-like brass chords. But the language of heroism is absent: no epic striving, no soaring hymns of triumph, no confrontation with threatening inner forces. Despite the prevailing minor mode, and the melancholy tone of some of its ideas, the Sixth Symphony ultimately conveys a feeling of peace. True, there are no easily identifiable ‘great tunes’ – like the trombone theme in No 7, or the ‘Swan Hymn’ for horns and woodwind in the finale of No 5 – but the music seems to be almost constantly singing. There is also a unique purity about the expression, which Sibelius summed up by remarking that, while other composers offered the world rich cocktails, what he provided here was ‘the purest spring water’.

Another feature that sets the Sixth Symphony apart is its extensive use of the old church Dorian Mode: imagine a scale of D minor on the piano using only the white notes – no B-flat or C-sharp, for example. Such ‘modal’ writing is also common in Finnish folk music – as it is in many other folk cultures – and Sibelius had used folk-modal themes in his symphonies before. But here the character of the mode dominates the music.

Sibelius would no doubt have been thinking of one of his musical idols, the Renaissance church composer Palestrina, whose famous Stabat Mater makes telling use of the Dorian mode. But it appears he was also deeply impressed by some of the composers of the English Tudor period, whose use of modes sometimes results in unusually piquant harmonies. It’s fascinating to consider that the striking discord formed at the first entry of the trumpets and trombones in the first movement of this symphony could have been inspired by similar expressive clashes in the motets of William Byrd or Thomas Tomkins.

Formally too, the Sixth Symphony is unique. Sibelius once said that a great symphony should be like a river, and this particular musical river follows its own course throughout. The spacious, ethereal polyphony (meaning two or more simultaneous melodic lines) of the opening builds eventually to a brass-enhanced climactic discord. This is an important turning point: as the brass chord dies away, woodwind with rustling strings and harp usher in a new, more active kind of music. Eventually this develops into a sustained instrumental song, pressing forwards above busily repetitive string figures. But the end is mysterious – and strangely inconclusive.

The second movement also begins mysteriously, with a kind of slow waltz emerging gradually from quiet, plaintive woodwind chords. But this dance-like movement is suddenly cut off, and we are transported to a hushed Nordic forest landscape, with whispering strings and snatches of birdsong on woodwind. At the end the waltz is fleetingly recalled, and then the movement is over.

The third movement starts like a fairly conventional scherzo – though once again, don’t expect it to proceed on conventional lines. Before long the dotted rhythm of the opening seems to get stuck in a groove, while flutes and harp pick out a folk-like tune in imitation. The whole process is repeated, then with a sudden dramatic gesture Sibelius brings the music to an abrupt close. More folk-like phrases set the finale in motion, with groups of wind and strings alternating like two separate choirs.

Eventually the music becomes stormy (in Sibelius’ sketches, one of these turbulent ideas is labelled ‘the pine tree spirit and the wind’), but calm slowly returns after a brief reminiscence of the symphony’s opening on violins. Finally, Sibelius introduces a rapt, hymn-like coda, this time led by a choir of strings with woodwind responses. At the end, only violins, violas and hushed timpani are left, bringing the symphony to a peaceful close in the minor key.

^{Note by Stephen Johnson}

Jean Sibelius
^{1865–1957 (Finland)}

The portraits, the photographs and above all the music tell one story, the biographies another. From the look of the man you would probably imagine Sibelius as an austere Nordic Titan: a man with his roots deep in wild, extreme Nordic nature, one who has learned self-mastery the hard way – like the musician-wizard hero Väinänmöinen of Finnish mythology. The music – especially the later symphonies and tone poems – appears to back this up. Elementally stirring, saturated in vivid, haunting atmospheres, it is nevertheless majestically structured, shaped like the forging of steel and almost ruthlessly concentrated.

So encountering Sibelius the man, through the accounts of family, friends and colleagues, can be quite a shock. As a boy he was a strange mixture of aloofness and desperate neediness. Although he was strongly encouraged as a violinist at Helsinki University (one teacher called him a ‘genius’), Sibelius was so crippled with nerves that he eventually had to give up any thought of a career as a concert soloist – to his intense and lasting regret.

As a composer Sibelius was tormented by self-doubt, which only got worse with time and experience. Without the support and encouragement of devoted and discerning friends like Alex Carpelan he may have destroyed far more of his work than he actually did. He became an obsessive reviser: the Fifth Symphony went through two major revisions before it reached the form we know today. Eventually the only way of silencing the savage critical voice in his own head was to drown it in alcohol. Stories of Sibelius’ drinking are striking. It is said that he sketched out the slow movement of his Violin Concerto during a colossal three-day hangover. Sometimes he would just disappear, to the mortification of his wife Aino, who on more than one occasion had to drag him out of some Helsinki watering hole and prop him back up at his writing desk.

This may have been at the root of the crisis which resulted in Sibelius' famous creative silence after 1926 – despite his having another three decades to live. (He almost certainly finished, then destroyed, an Eighth Symphony some time in the early 1930s.) Aino Sibelius was a heroically patient woman, but on coming down one morning and finding Sibelius comatose at his desk yet again she finally snapped and presented the composer with an ultimatum: essentially ‘pull yourself together or I go.’ Sibelius tried to rein in his drinking, but artistically the result was that very little got past the inner censor. In the end he resigned himself to silence, and according to his daughters this brought him a kind of peace – or at least relief. Certainly he seems to have been much happier in his final years.

So why does the music give such a radically different impression? We can hear evidence of Sibelius’ agonising personal struggles in works like the Fourth Symphony and the tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter. But in the end Sibelius could be said to exemplify a principle spelled out by the poet W B Yeats: ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose: perfection of the life or of the work’. As his diaries confirm movingly, Sibelius found in music the means to confront and even transcend his own pain, fear and need. And as many have found since, the music that resulted from those struggles can help others do the same. In his day-to-day life he may have been no Titan, but in his work he was.

^{Composer profile by Stephen Johnson}

1 Chaos – Light – Darkness –
2 Separation of the Waters into Sea and Sky – Reflection dance –
3 Land – Grass – Trees –
4 Stars – Sun – Moon –
5 Creatures of the Sea and Sky –
6 Creatures of the Land –
7 Contemplation

In its original form, In Seven Days was a collaboration, not only between piano and orchestra, but also between music and video art, the latter created by Tal Rosner. The music beautifully adapts to its ally – and at the same time discovers rich possibilities for itself – in how it proceeds in segments, suggesting scans of a visual field, that build a continuity. Such a form allows the composer to treat the subject of Creation by focusing on creation – on how tiny particles of sound can combine, and recombine, and jostle against one another, to produce a half-hour span.

In Seven Days is a fractal composition, a work in which certain simple elements – as simple as the rising scale step that kicks the whole thing off – are repeated again and again in contexts that are in a constant state of change. This takes place thanks to the composer’s virtuoso control of rhythm and, especially, harmony, his twisted tonality emerging, totally fresh, from decades of popular music as well as from the classical tradition.

Composing against a visual counterpoint, Adès does not attempt to evoke the objects of Creation so much as the processes, and the energies. Often the result of a creative act is not one thing but two.

On the first day, for instance, God creates heaven and earth, and light and darkness. Accordingly, Adès works with musical oppositions – of orchestra and piano, of course, but also of different groups within the orchestra, or of extremities of pitch, or rival harmonic forces. His music for this first day is led off as a perpetuum mobile by the strings, whose larger cycles bring in other orchestral families. These, having been installed, set out on their own courses, the woodwinds spiralling down, the brass moving towards a chorale that heralds the piano.

Racing at double speed, the soloist soon moves into a melodious complexity that engages the orchestra and winds down into the bass, from which a rise leads into the second day. Tuned percussion enter here, in what develops from note repetitions into an infinite simultaneity of ascending and descending lines, perhaps suggesting Escher’s perpetual staircases.

The plant life of the third day burgeons as growing variation (but then, everything here is growing variation), from the extreme bass to a majestic climax.

Divine astronomy in the fourth day is figured as glittering starscapes and the beneficent harmony, perhaps, of the sun.

Days five (aquatic life) and six (terrestrial) are represented by a fugue in two sections – one without the piano, the other with the piano to the fore – telling us that everything is gentle, calming benediction. But then, at the end of the following contemplation, the whole process seems about to start over again. Creation is neverending.

^{Note by Paul Griffiths}

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Programme Contributors

Stephen Johnson is the author of Bruckner Remembered (Faber). He contributes regularly to BBC Music Magazine and The Guardian, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 (BBC Legends and Discovering Music), Radio 4 and World Service.

Paul Griffiths has been a critic for nearly 40 years, including for The Times and The New Yorker, and is an authority on 20th and 21st-century music. Among his books are studies of Boulez, Ligeti and Stravinsky. He also writes novels and librettos.