Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Jean Sibelius’ masterpiece Finlandia
JEAN SIBELIUS Finlandia
Vasily Petrenko conductor
One of the great late-Romantic composers, who single handedly placed Finland on the musical map. And there’s nothing more Finnish than Sibelius’s Finlandia.
Watch the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra tackle this Finnish masterpiece, performed at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in November 2009. Sibelius originally wrote this for a scenic piece called Finland Awakes, which was presented at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki in protest against the drastic suppression of political freedom by Finland’s Russian masters in the February Manifesto of 1899. The atmosphere of oppression would have been palpable enough for those who heard the piece, if not, the allusion to Emil Genetz’s well-known song ‘Herää Suomi!’ (‘Arise, Finland!’) and the increasingly triumphant mood of the work can have left no doubt in the Finnish mind as to what the message was meant to be.
If you’ve seen The Hunt for Red October or Die Hard 2 you’ll know to get the big guns primed when Finlandia pops up; this thing could go nuclear…
Download the programme notes for this performance.
