![]() Here is a man who produced masterpieces and kitsch, cheek by jowl, over the course of four decades and then stopped writing music altogether for the last 25 years of his life. He left a mixed legacy: Along with the resplendent tone poems, the magnificent Violin Concerto and the familiar symphonies (at least four of which would make most lists of 20th-century classics) exists a vast quantity of songs, chamber music and piano compositions, most of which are unknown and unplayed.Īnd with good reason. The piano pieces in particular are interesting only in their very lack of interest. With a few exceptions, they are conventional, late-romantic intermezzos, without character or individuality, along the lines of those myriad "Album Leaves" by minor composers that once filled keyboard anthologies in Victorian parlors. ![]() The songs are better, as are the works for violin and piano, but these, too, have yet to find much of an audience. Only one of the many chamber works Sibelius composed has always been recognized as fully worthy of his gifts - the String Quartet in D Minor, known as "Voces Intimae" ("Intimate Voices"). Sibelius wrote this austerely beautiful work in 1909, in the same period that produced such daringly original musical explorations as the tone poem "Night Ride and Sunrise," the cantata-in-miniature "Luonnatar" and the Symphony No. "Voces Intimae" is no easier to fathom if Sibelius's orchestral works are characterized by panoramic sweep and color, this quartet might be compared to a subtly graded lithograph, a bleakly beautiful exploration of musical grays.Īs it happens, Sibelius had already written three string quartets by the time he began "Voces Intimae" - the Quartet in E-flat (1885) when he was 20, the Quartet in A Minor (1889) during his last year at the Helsinki Music Institute, and a Quartet in B-flat (1890), which he considered one of his first mature works. The Sibelius Academy Quartet is heard in the first three works, recorded during the 1980s, with a more recent recording of the New Helsinki Quartet playing "Voces Intimae." Now the Finlandia label has issued a two-CD set of the complete quartets. While the early quartets cannot be spoken of in the same breath as "Voces Intimae," they have their own distinct charms - vigor, directness of expression, fluent part-writing for the instruments, and some hearty tunes.
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