JEAN SIBELIUS DAY GALA CONCERT

The Independence Day and Jean Sibelius Day gala concert is a reminder that Finnish music is rooted in the forest.

The world is now captivated by the music of Outi Tarkiainen, an orchestral colourist who grew up surrounded by the nature of Lapland. Perhaps the most successful Finnish composer of recent times, she depicts a dazzling phenomenon in her work Day Night Day, completed in 2025, as snowfields, glistening in the spring sunshine, recede toward the north.

Everyone knows Sibelius’s Finlandia, but The Wood-Nymph is a rarity on concert programmes. Composed in 1895, this tone poem tells the tale, from a poem by Viktor Rydberg, of a man who encounters an enchantingly beautiful spirit in the forest. An ever-deepening spiral of love and obsession overcomes his rationality, with fatal consequences.

In Sibelius’s Luonnotar, the star performer is Iris Candelaria, whose successes include victories in the Lappeenranta Singing Competition and the Timo Mustakallio Singing Competition.