READ BARNES, GO HEAR SIBELIUS

~ Posted by Charlie McCann, December 12th 2011

There's just one problem with reading Julian Barnes on Jean Sibelius: it makes you want to hear the music. And Sibelius, important as he is, isn't the kind of composer whose tunes you can necessarily rustle up in your mind's ear. Some of the works Barnes mentions on his visit to Ainola, Sibelius’s home near Helsinki, will be performed live over the next few weeks. The Violin Concerto, which he wrote the year after moving into Ainola, will be performed by Elina Vähälä in Birmingham on January 26th and in London the following day. Akiko Suwanai will also be playing the concerto in Cardiff on February 10th. The concert in Cardiff also features the last major work that Sibelius composed before his great silence descended, the symphonic poem “Tapiola”.

If you would like to hear one of the five symphonies that Sibelius wrote while he lived in Ainola, his Fifth will also be performed in Birmingham and London on January 26th and 27th, his Sixth and Seventh symphonies will be performed by the BBC Symphony in London on December 16th, his Fourth by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in Stockholm on February 2nd, and his Fifth and Seventh by the Wiener Philharmoniker in Vienna on February 18th and 19th. His Second Symphony, which he wrote before he moved to Ainola, will be played by the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 12th-14th.

Closer to home, this afternoon BBC Radio 3 has broadcast some of Sibelius’s shorter orchestral works. On December 16th, Radio 3’s "Live in Concert" will broadcast Sibelius’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. The "Valse Triste" is Sibelius' most famous work. "In the 1930s," Julian Barnes writes, "it was estimated to be the world's second most-played tune after 'White Christmas'." There's a video of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie playing the Valse on YouTube: 230,000 have watched this. Still not quite as many as "White Christmas".

Charlie McCann is an intern at Intelligent Life

Picture: Ainola, the house in the woods near Helsinki, where Sibelius lived, photographed by Emma Hardy