Symphonic Concert

The output of Finland's greatest composer, Jean Sibelius, holds a distinctive place in the musical landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its highly individual style combines Romantic features—often marked by an experimental spirit—with a dark sonorous palette and a type of elegiac expressiveness widely recognised as characteristic of the Scandinavian musical idiom. Composed between 1903 and 1905, the Violin Concerto in D minor is among the most compelling and representative examples of this style. The work is founded on a striking contrast between the solo instrument and the orchestra. The highly prominent and technically demanding violin part harks back to the tradition of the Romantic virtuoso concerto, while the orchestra is conceived symphonically, its massive sonority dominated by the sombre colouring of the lower registers.

Arnold Schoenberg’s symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande shares with Sibelius’s Concerto the same year of composition—a time of transition that, for the great musical innovator Schoenberg was soon to become, marked a turning point towards the as yet undefined world of the avant-garde. He had already begun to feel constrained by the Romantic idiom, not only in technical terms but, above all, in its emotional expressive range. Maurice Maeterlinck’s celebrated drama, with its elusive and highly symbolic message, which provides the narrative basis for the symphonic poem, offered him the opportunity to give violent and uninhibited musical expression to dark emotions that transcended the limits of the existing musical language. The music swells and erupts with an unprecedented force, thus giving rise to a new, Expressionist world of sound imagination.

Robert Losiak

Programme

• Jean Sibelius — Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47
• ... intermission
• Arnold Schönberg — Symphonic Poem Pelleas und Melisande, Op. 5