![]() ![]() The finale of the Third is a “crystallisation of chaos”, as he called it, that fuses scherzo and finale into a new kind of symphonic motion, music that generates a momentum that is simultaneously monumental, massive and irresistibly rapid. The journey towards the Seventh’s Symphony’s compression, its atomic collisions of different kinds of symphonic movement in a single, hyper-concentrated span, has its first precedent in Sibelius’s Third Symphony. It’s tribute to the huge emotional power of Sibelius’s music that it produces such wildly divergent interpretations – but I want to focus a little more on the scream rather than the triumph of what Thomas Adès, like Rattle, has called the “painfully inconclusive” ending of this symphony.īut let’s first think about the unique ambition of what Sibelius is attempting here. For many other commentators and conductors, the end of this symphony is the “grandest celebration of C major there ever was”, or a “triumphantly abrupt’ ending. It was first performed in 1924, when it was called “Symphonic Fantasy” only when the piece was published a year later did Sibelius call it a symphony, the last he would give to the world). Sibelius’s 7th Symphony is more conventionally thought of as a vindication of a new kind of symphonic form (it plays for 22 minutes or so in a continuous single movement) and a reclamation of the affirmatory power of tonal possibility. ![]()
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