Sibelius Festival 2026 explores Jean Sibelius’s journey toward his most authentic artistic expression, towards his inner voices.

‘We can say that Jean Sibelius is one of the most brilliant tone poets of the present time’, wrote the Finnish musicologist Erik Furuhjelm in 1916. ‘Among the composers living today there is probably only one – Richard Strauss – who is wholly qualified to be mentioned alongside Jean Sibelius.’ The works in the first orchestral concert connect these two composers in several ways. The Don Juan story, retold by Nikolaus Lenau, was the basis for Strauss’s eponymous tone poem; Pushkin’s version (The Stone Guest) was in Sibelius’s mind while he was developing ideas for his Second Symphony. And the conductor at the premiere of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, in its definitive version, was Richard Strauss. But whereas Don Juan and Sibelius’s Second impressed audiences right from the start, Sibelius’s Violin Concerto took a long time to become firmly established; after withdrawing the longer original version, Sibelius himself did not conduct the revised one until 1924. Nowadays all three of these sonorous, vibrantly Romantic works regularly delight audiences all over the world.

Richard Strauss is also represented by his Violin Sonata from 1887 – like Don Juan, a relatively early work. By contrast, the seven short Sibelius works in the same chamber concert come from 1929, the very end of his active career, when he was hard at work on his ill-fated Eighth Symphony.

The second orchestral concert highlights the relationship between Sibelius and Ferruccio Busoni. During the relatively short period when Busoni was working in Helsinki (1888–90), he and Sibelius forged a lifelong friendship. Busoni was also the pianist at the partial premiere in 1890 of Sibelius’s Piano Quintet (heard at the 2025 Sibelius Festival). That work is probably the closest Sibelius ever came to writing a piano concerto, though it is dwarfed by Busoni’s own massive concerto heard in this concert. As a pianist, Busoni’s abilities were clearly exceptional, though Sibelius expressed reservations about his skills as a composer and conductor. Busoni influenced Sibelius’s Third Symphony at a more conceptual level. The Italian’s interest in music theory led him to write extensively on the subject, and he developed the idea of ’Young Classicism’ – a rejection of 19th-century programmatic trends and a return to objectivity and formal clarity. Sibelius’s Third Symphony – written with the utmost precision, and full of invention and subtlety – turns decisively away from the crowd-pleasing Romanticism of the first two symphonies and brilliantly puts the ideas of Young Classicism into practice. This concert is bookended by two of Sibelius’s most popular pieces: Valse triste from the score for the Arvid Järnefelt’s Symbolist play Kuolema, and the patriotic favourite Finlandia.

Whereas Sibelius had productive interaction with both Strauss and Busoni, Alban Berg and Sergei Rachmaninov are outliers. Sibelius never met nor maintained correspondence with either of them, and their music occupies rather different aesthetic realms from his. Sibelius’s only mature string quartet, Voces intimae, a largely introspective work written during his seven years of soul-searching and sobriety after he had undergone throat surgery, is heard in the second chamber concert. It was completed in 1909 and is thus contemporary with Alban Berg’s spikier but still approachable String Quartet.

Of the works in the final concert, the tone poems Night Ride and Sunrise and The Bard, one emphatically pictorial and the other subdued and fragile, likewise come from the years after Sibelius’s operation. The main work from this period, however, was the Fourth Symphony, his ‘psychological symphony’, dark and brooding, by general agreement an absolute cornerstone of his output. Many years later Sibelius remarked: ‘even today I cannot find a single note in it that I could remove, nor can I find anything to add’. The concepts of night and the course of life in Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells align with the poem by Edgar Allan Poe on which the work is based. Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, too, has a connection to Poe: some motifs in the finale were originally planned for an orchestral song based on the poem The Raven. And while Sibelius didn’t share Rachmaninov’s passion for the sound of bells, he did include a glockenspiel part in the symphony’s finale (some performances have mistakenly used tubular bells here). Moreover, Sibelius did write one genuine bell melody around this time – in 1912, for the newly built Kallio Church in Helsinki.

Andrew Barnett