Sibelius Festival Programme
ENCOUNTERS
SIBELIUS-FESTIVAALI 2025-2027
‘The originality of Jean Sibelius’s output can prevent us from noticing his connections with other composers and musical styles. We know that as a young man he admired Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner and that he was well aware of the stylistic turbulence of the early 20th century. His circle of friends included some of the most important international musicians of the era. The timelessness and contemporary approach of Sibelius’s late period inspired future composers. As part of the Sibelius Festival, we want to show what those connections mean in practice.
One festival is not enough; we need three.
I have considered it a special honour to plan the Sibelius Festival and have sought to keep the focus of the programme on the master composer’s output. The works by other composers have been selected according to the above considerations. I am grateful for this trust and look forward to magical encounters with Sibelius.’
Hannu Lintu
Artistic Director, Lahti Symphony Orchestra´s Sibelius Festival
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2025
28.-30.8.2025 Sibelius Hall, Lahti
Thursday 28.8.2025 at 18.30 Sibeliust Hall
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2025 OPENING CONCERT
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Johanna Rusanen, soprano
Davóne Tines, baritone
YL Male Voice Choir
Gustav Mahler: Todtenfeier (1888)
Jean Sibelius: Kullervo (1892)
Folk poetry was the point of departure for both Mahler and Sibelius: at the turn of the 1880s–1890s, one of them based his production on the nature-inspired poems of Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the other on the verses of the Kalevala. The works in this concert are the starting point for the musical careers of these two great symphonists, and poetry about death is present from the first bar to the last.
Friday 29.8.2025 at 15.30 Sibelius Hall
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2025 CHAMBER MUSIC CONCERT
Ossi Tanner, piano
ILOA String Quartet
Jean Sibelius: Piano Sonata in F major (1893)
Pyotr Tchaikovsky: String Quartet in B flat major (1865)
Jean Sibelius: String Quartet in A minor (1889)
Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet in B flat major, written in the year of Sibelius’s birth, is thought to be the only surviving movement of his first try at writing for this medium. ‘Fresh, refreshing and full of life’ is how the Russian pianist Alexander Siloti described Sibelius’s only complete piano sonata. The ambitious String Quartet in A minor was Sibelius’s graduation work from the Helsinki Music Academy; the critic Karl Flodin wrote that he had ‘with one stroke placed himself foremost among those who have been entrusted with bearing the banner of Finnish music’.
Friday 29.8.2025 at 18.30 Sibelius Hall
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2025 CONCERT
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Miina-Liisa Värelä, soprano
Klaus Florian Vogt, tenor
Ain Anger, bass
Jean Sibelius: The Lemminkäinen Suite (1891)
Richard Wagner: Die Walküre, Act I (1870)
Sibelius’s Wagnerian opera project foundered in the early 1890s, but lives on powerfully in the four Lemminkäinen tone poems. There are many similarities between the Kalevala and the Nibelungenlied, and both played a major role in the rise of national identity in the late 19th century. Lemminkäinen and Siegfried are perfect material for a late-Romantic composer, as if carved from the same tree – untamed and forthright.
Saturday 30.8.2025 at 14.30 Sibelius Hall
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2025 CHAMBER MUSIC CONCERT
Ossi Tanner, piano
ILOA String Quartet
Edvard Grieg: Lyric Pieces for piano (1867–1901)
Jean Sibelius: Piano Quintet in G minor (1890)
Edvard Grieg wrote ten books of Lyric Pieces for piano, a grand total of 66 works including some of his best-loved miniatures, often with an attractive, picturesque and piquant touch of folk music. By contrast, Sibelius’s dramatic five-movement Piano Quintet – the closest he ever came to writing a piano concerto – is conceived on a grand scale, clearly pointing the way forward to his orchestral music of the 1890s.
Saturday 30.8.2025 at 17 Sibelius Hall
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2025 FINAL CONCERT
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Karita Mattila, soprano
Jean Sibelius: Karelia Suite (1893)
Jean Sibelius & Edvard Grieg: Orchestral Songs
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 (1899)
The young Sibelius and Edvard Grieg are at the heart of Nordic lyricism. Nature and love are recurring themes in the songs of both composers. Grieg was about 20 years older than Sibelius and therefore had a direct link to the German classical-romantic tradition. Grieg’s Scandinavian voice is echoed in Sibelius’s early works, especially in his songs and chamber music.
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2026
27.-29.8.2026 Sibelius Hall, Lahti
Thursday 27.8.2026
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Inmo Yang, violin
Richard Strauss: Don Juan (1888)
Jean Sibelius: Violin Concerto (1905)
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 (1902)
‘I can do more, but he is greater’, Richard Strauss said about Sibelius. Strauss conducted the final version of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto at its premiere in Berlin in 1905. When Sibelius travelled to Italy in 1901, his vision was to compose music for the story of Don Juan. The result, however, was a symphony whose tensions and outbursts may have originated from that plan.
Friday 28.8.2026
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Kirill Gerstein, piano
YL Male Voice Choir
Jean Sibelius: Valse Triste (1904)
Ferruccio Busoni: Piano Concerto (1903)
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No 3 (1907)
Jean Sibelius: Finlandia (1900)
The golden age of male choral singing dates back to the 19th century in German-speaking countries. It made its way from patriotic occasions and taverns onto concert platforms throughout Europe. Sibelius and his friend Ferruccio Busoni, who taught piano at the Helsinki Music Institute, were both fascinated by the sonority and expressive power of the male-voice choir. Busoni would hardly have included a male choir in his vast Piano Concerto had he not been influenced by Franz Liszt and Sibelius.
Saturday 29.8.2026
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Olga Heikkilä, soprano
Mihails Čulpajevs, tenor
Gabriel Kivivuori-Sereno, baritone
Dominante
Jean Sibelius: Bardi (1913)
Sergei Rachmaninov: The Bells (1913)
Jean Sibelius: Night Ride and Sunrise (1908)
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 4 (1911)
In 1908, Sibelius’s serious health problems were at their most acute, and a new period in his output began, in which he explored his inner voices. National romanticism was left behind and a cosmopolitan symphonist emerged. The Fourth Symphony contains music originally intended for The Raven, an orchestral song that was never completed based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. A text by the same poet is set in Sergei Rachmaninov’s expressionist choral fantasy The Bells.
SIBELIUS FESTIVAL 2027
2.-4.9.2027 Sibelius Hall, Lahti
Thursday 2.9.2027
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Sol Gabetta, cello
Jean Sibelius: Pohjola´s Daughter (1906)
Edvard Elgar: Cello Consertto (1919)
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (1919)
Sibelius’s relationship with England was always warm, and remains so. The final version of the Fifth Symphony and Edward Elgar’s swansong, the magnificent Cello Concerto, date from the same year. Each in its own way reflects the social and artistic crossroads at which Europe found itself after the First World War. Whereas Elgar looks back to a world that has just been lost, Sibelius looks forward to the future. Pohjola’s Daughter represents a point of demarcation for Sibelius: it is a glorious culmination of the national romantic period, but simultaneously represents the new, universal Sibelius.
Friday 3.9.2027
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
The Helsinki Chamber Choir
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: Tu es Petrus, motetti (1572)
Jean Sibelius: Sinfonia 6 (1923)
Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms (1930)
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No. 7 (1924)
Sibelius, like Igor Stravinsky, studied the works of the Renaissance composers, and the linearity of the Sixth Symphony is said to have been inspired by the ‘horizontal’ organization in the choral works of Palestrina, the great master of the second half of the 16th century. In the 1920s, many European composers sought monumental clarity of expression. Sibelius and Stravinsky were in their own ways at the forefront of this development. Both the Symphony of Psalms and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony strive towards the brightness of C major.
Saturday 4.9.2027
Sinfonia Lahti
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Tuuli Takala, soprano
Senja Rummukainen, cello
Jean Sibelius: Oceanides (1914)
Magnus Lindberg: Marea (1990)
Kaija Saariaho: Mirage (2007)
Jean Sibelius: Luonnotar (1913)
Outi Tarkiainen: Midnight Sun Variations (2019)
Jean Sibelius: Tapiola (1926)
Sibelius’s Tapiola does not describe nature as such, but rather the emotions that nature evokes in us. The composer’s musical relationship with nature evolved from mythological and romantic tone painting to an exploration of the inner nature of man. The final concert of the festival is devoted to the Sibelius’s modernism and the way his music looks towards the future.