The rest, it seems, is not to remain quite silence from the 32 years Jean Sibelius lived on after completing his last major work, the astonishing incidental music for a production of The Tempest in 1925. There are a handful of smaller-scale pieces, and the hope that an Eighth Symphony apparently ready for publication in 1933 was not entirely consumed by fire in the living-room grate of the composer's humble home outside Järvenpää, as one of his grandsons reported.
Various speculations over fragments and lines in manuscripts over the years are as nothing compared to three fully realised orchestral sketches which have just come to light, the quality of which we can now judge for ourselves. The path leads from New York music critic Alex Ross's blog to an article in the English-language version of Helsingin Sanomat by Vesa Sirén. We learn how the two excellent conductors of Helsinki's main orchestras, Sakari Oramo at the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and John Storgårds of the Helsinki Philharmonic, were agog to try out how it sounded. Which Storgårds and the HPO did; you can hear the results at 2 mins 9 secs into the film on this webpage.
As Oramo remarks, this is "archaic dissonance", in other words those clashes which feel right in Sibelius's late style. The first example especially takes us on as much of a strange new journey as the beginning of Elgar's Third Symphony. Undoubtedly there isn't enough material here to work up a complete performing version such as Anthony Payne controversially did with the Elgar, but it's good to have just a few more of those "mosaic pieces", as Sibelius put it, "thrown down from God's floor". Would it be asking too much for another superb Finnish interpreter, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, to feature the fragments alongside the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies in his forthcoming BBC Symphony Orchestra Sibelius cycle concert? That would be quite a UK premiere.
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