Jean Sibelius conducts "Andante Festivo" in 1939
Jean Sibelius - Andante Festivo, JS 34b, for String Orchestra and Timpani, conducted by Jean Sibelius with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Radion sinfoniaorkesteri). Helsinki Concert Hall, Finland. New Year's Eve Radio Broadcast, 1Jan 1939.
Andante Festivo is a single movement composition by Jean Sibelius, originally scored for string quartet in 1922. In 1938, the composer rescored the piece for string orchestra and timpani. Full-throated and hymnic, this piece of work is constructed as a smooth, continuous stream of similar melodic phrases that flow into and out of each other.
Despite the rejection of the string orchestra repertoire by several major publishers of his day, including the extremely influential Breitkopf & Härtel, Sibelius was drawn to the medium throughout his lifetime. Most of his works, however, are arrangements of works composed in other media that were more easily publishable and might be familiar to listeners in other guises. In 1922 Sibelius composed Andante Festivo for the 25th anniversary of the Saynatsalo plywood mill. First written for a string quartet and later arranged for a string orchestra and timpani ad libitum, it has a musical vocabulary in almost complete opposition to the prevailing trends in art and music at the time. While it would have been rather fashionable, as well as appropriate for the occasion, to capture the mechanical features of the mill, Sibelius' greatest inspiration was nature, and the work features a tone of almost sacred solemnity. On 1 January 1939, to the astonishment of all, he appeared in front of an orchestra again after an absence of over a decade to conduct the short Andante festivo, which is technically not very difficult. This was for an international radio broadcast in honour of the World Expo in New York. Curiously, Sibelius conducted the premiere of this work, long into his retirement, in a 1939 live radio broadcast to the United States on New Year's Eve.
This radio broadcast recording of this piece from January 1, 1939, with Sibelius conducting, is the only recorded example of the composer interpreting one of his own works.
Only one single recording has survived as a testimony of Sibelius's art as a conductor.
http://www.sibelius.fi/english/musiik...
1.I.1939
Art by Caspar David Friedrich, Felsenriff am Meeresstrand (Rocky Reef on The Sea Shore), picture at exhibition Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.
The Quest for Infinity. A melancholic search is undertaken for the sources of the earliest and most perfect periods, with a return being made to the references of classical Mediterranean cultures. Also sought out are the symbolic and mystical dimensions of the sea as a place where humans seem unable to exist, the waters being a space of divine creation. As if enacting a return to the beginning, images of the sea are finally rendered empty in the pure depiction of waters separated from skies, paintings whose very dimensions seek to evoke the immensity of the sea. This is a paradoxical desire. It appeals both to infinitude and transcendence in its symbolic schematism and physical grandeur, tending towards a serenity that is initially imaginated and that evokes a feeling of eternity, just as it convulses us in turbulent visions made up of emotion, feeling and frenzy.
The seas painted by Caspar David Friedrich are never inhabited spaces although they might serve as objects of contemplation for solitary characters. The sea seems to be an entity in which humans cannot exist, a territory that belongs to divine creation. Man, being on the outside, questions this immensity and the mysteries of its silences, the skies reflected in the waters, or the shapes created by unknown causes, such as the rocks with their harsh profiles.