LINTU CONDUCTS SIBELIUS was recognized with many of her field’ s top international awards, including the Grawemeyer Award, Sonning Prize, and Polar Music Prize.
Ciel d’ hiver traces its ancestry to Saariaho’ s orchestral work Orion, from 2002— three movements relating to the figure of Greek mythology who was an adventurous hunter on Earth before taking permanent form as a heavenly constellation. In 2013, she revised the second movement into the standalone Ciel d’ hiver, downsizing the extravagance of her original orchestration while maintaining the sense of a frigid night sky where melodic motifs glisten and flicker like stars within a frame of incomprehensible vastness. Timbres that might be described as icy or glassy are prominent: piccolo, harp, celesta, and many gently attacked percussion instruments. The piece seems to reach something approaching solid ground with the arrival of massive( though mostly quiet) chords in a central section, but soon this music recedes to eventual silence.
Instrumentation: Two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons( second doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, timpani, crotales, glass chimes, shell chimes, triangle, tam-tam, suspended cymbals( small, medium, and large), vibraphone, small bell, bass drum, celesta, harp, piano, and strings.
Jean Sibelius
SYMPHONY NO. 7 IN C, OP. 105
[ 1918 – 24 ]
Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony ushers us into his late period, when he focused on paring down his music to its essentials, achieving an intensely involving sense of visionary spirituality. He worked on his final three symphonies concurrently for several years beginning in 1918, with the Seventh occupying him until 1924.
In its early stages, he sensed that this final symphony would unroll through three separate movements, but in the
BSO staff and friends enjoying the 2025 Meyerhoff Gala
end, he brought everything together into a single movement lasting some 22 minutes, passing through 11 discrete sections marked with differing tempos. That form was not traditionally associated with a symphony; in fact, he intended to title the piece Fantasia sinfonica. That’ s what the piece was called when he conducted the first few performances— or would have been if a misgendered adjective hadn’ t crept into the printed program, which spelled the piece“ Fantasia sinfonico.” Following the premiere, one critic, assuming it was a piece of program music, lamented that the composer had not revealed its narrative plot. Sibelius forwarded the review to his wife, along with the comment:“ How little they grasp of what I have done in this piece. But que faire!”
The musicologist James Hepokoski, a leading Sibelius authority, writes that
“ its ad hoc structure emerges link-by-link from the transformational processes of the musical ideas themselves— a content-based form constantly in the process of becoming,” and went on to proclaim the Seventh Symphony to be“ surely Sibelius’ most remarkable compositional achievement.” In 1939, the British music analyst Donald Francis Tovey compared the experience of listening to Sibelius’ Seventh to the sensation of flying in an aircraft.“ An aeronaut carried with the wind,” he remarked,“ has no sense of movement at all.… He moves in the air and can change his pace without breaking his movement.”
JAMES M. KELLER, the longtime Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’ s Guide( Oxford University Press).
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