Sibelius 5 th symohony 3rd movement series#

After a brisk 1 st movement and more melancholy 2 nd movement, the 3 rd movement resonated with familiarity with variations on the musical’s signature song: New York, New York, It’s a Helluva Town. It quickly morphed into On The Town, a full-scale Broadway musical that later because a 1949 cinematic vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, who were on their way to superstardom. The music for On The Town was first composed for Bernstein’s jazz ballet Fancy Free, about three sailors on shore leave in New York City during World War II. The Sibelius piece concluded a program that began with Three Dance Episodes from On The Town, composed in 1944 by Leonard Bernstein, then a 25-year-old wunderkind of American classical music. Influenced by George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, Bernstein took the first step in bridging classical and modern music that would culminate in West Side Story 13 years later.

Carlos Kalmar shares interesting background and anecdotes about each piece the ensemble is about to perform.

The 3 rd movement rises to the power and lyricism of what Sibelius described as the Swan Hymn-inspired by the slght of 16 swans flying overhead-before the emphatic closing of the power chords. The 2 nd movement curiously involves lengthy passages of pizzicato, aka string-plucking. His 5 th Symphony bridges those eras. The pastoral beginning to the 1 st movement gives way to an increasingly urgent counterpoint between the strings and winds before calming again. 4, completed in 1911, plunged deeply into the dissonant rhythms of modernism that reflected Sibelius’ own serious health and financial troubles at the time. Sibelius’ 5th Symphony debuted in 1915 by the time he completed the final version in 1919, Finland had declared its independence from Russia in 1917 and endured a civil war in which forces seeking to emulate Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution were defeated.Īlong with experiencing numerous historical eras during his long life (1865-1957), Sibelius composed during the transition between the late Romantic era of classical music and the modernist era. His most famous work is Finlandia, a statement of national identity completed in 1900, when Finland was toward the end of a century as a virtual colony of Czarist Russia. Sibelius was fond of bold statements, not surprising for one of the few composers revered as a national hero during his lifetime.

On the fifth stroke, the piece, and the concert, ended.

Sibelius 5 th symohony 3rd movement series#

But then the real finale ensued: a series of five sledgehammer chords, with a pause between each one. The abrupt ending to the Sibelius symphony appeared to have arrived as the orchestra took a pause so pregnant that some in the audience started their applause. Kalmar, at the first of two performances of the piece this past weekend, referred to its ending, relating what he was once told by a conductor friend from Finland, the homeland of Sibelius: Finnish conversations, even when warm and friendly, typically end abruptly. Grant Park Music Festival Conductor Carlos Kalmar coyly hinted that the audience should expect the unexpected during his introduction to Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. Conductor Carlos Kalmar and the Grant Park Orchestra.