The concert was held on 13 October at the Victoria Concert Hall and it is the second instalment of the Sibelius Complete Cycle, the first instalment was performed back in 2008.
The concert started off with Sibelius’s ‘Symphony No.4 in A minor, Op.63’, which was composed in 1911. When the performance ended, there was a ‘puzzled silence’, the audience and I were hesitant to clap as we were unsure if the piece has ended. The symphony is known to be a very dark and gloomy work of Sibelius due to the use of tritones. The symphony begins with a brooding passage from the basses, cellos and bassoons, the first four notes of the symphony make up a whole-tone scale. At the same time, the same instruments hold a C, which functions firstly as a pedal point that brings the piece back into an A-minor key, and a reminder that this symphony revolves around that uneasy interval, the tritone, an F# pitted against a C. When Sibelius was composing this symphony, he was going through a very difficult period in his life. A few years earlier, he was diagnosed with cancer, doctors had discovered a malignant tumor in his throat. Although he got it surgically removed, he was worried for several years that his time left would be short. He had to abstain from his favorite habits, cigars and alcohol. Besides that, he was also heavily in debt. A possible theory as to why he wrote this dark symphony is because it was linked to geo-political events around that time, apparently many commentators believe that it somehow foreshadowed the First World War. This theory however is weak as at that point, Finland was still fighting for their autonomy from Imperial Russia, and Finnish territory was spared for most the First World War. The year before beginning the symphony, Sibelius met many of his contemporaries in Western and Central Europe, these included Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and others. He was exposed to many new ideas from young radical composers, and did not react well to them, writing to this biographer that this symphony stands as a protest against modern day music. This particular protest is both the reason why it feels so gloomy, and why it is one of the pinnacles of Sibelius output.
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After the 4th symphony, there was a 20 minutes intermission to give the audience a break from the dark and heavy mood of the music. The orchestra then performed his patriotic 2nd symphony in D major which was composed in 1902. The groundbreaking quality of his 2nd symphony is twofold: its advancement of symphonic development, and its subtle association with Finnish nationalism. In an often-quoted dialogue, a fellow composer Gustav Mahler, mentioned “a symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything”. Sibelius, on the contrary, preferred the symphony’s ‘profound logic and inner connection’, which suggest to Sibelius’ preference for continual and rigorous motivic development. This was one of Sibelius’ biggest contributions to music, and is the backbone for this symphony. There are four movements in the piece: Allegretto, Tempo andante, ma rubato, Vivacissimo and Allegro moderato. The arrival of the last movement is grand and triumphant, just as Robert Kajanus, friend of Sibelius and conductor of many of his works imagine how Finnish independence would feel. As an audience, I was very impressed with how well the music was executed by the orchestra, they were able to bring out the nuances in the music. The audience gave a rousing applause when the orchestra ended with a sonorous D major chord.
In the efforts to publicize the concert, there was a free outreach performance held a week before at Tampines Hub Festive Arts Theatre to promote late romantic/early-modern music to the general public and bring up the ticket sales. For the performance, only selected extracts of each symphony were performed so as to give a feel to the audience of what Sibelius’ music is like. The emcee also highlighted the social and historical contexts of the pieces to pique the audience’ interests and to give a background knowledge of what the music is supposed to sound like. I felt that this method of marketing is great as there could be people in the audience who have never watched a classical music concert, and this performance could open up the world of orchestral music to them.
In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the concert as it gave me a rollercoaster of emotions and made me fell in love with music by Sibelius. It also made me reflect about several aspects of life: how life can so fragile and how it is full of struggles and uncertainties. I would definitely watch another concert by the Philharmonic Orchestra in the future and listen to more works by the great Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.
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