Jean Sibelius, Violin Concerto

"A statue has never been erected to a critic"

Like many of his colleagues, the future Finnish composer Jean Sibelius left his hometown as a boy to study law in the capital, on family recommendation, despite the fact that within the same family, the little boy had generously displayed his musical talent, led by the hand of his aunt Julia who, unlike what happened with a famous novelist, only taught him to play the piano.

Sibelius, the violinist
But one year after entering the University of Helsinki, in 1885, Sibelius abandoned his studies and enrolled in the Music School of the city. There he studied violin and composition. His goal was to become a violin virtuoso, but, unfortunately, Jean seems to have had no fingers for the violin, despite the fact that he was part of the string quartet that the School boasted about and did quite well with the Mendelssohn Concerto. A trembling of the hand originated in a youth accident and the nervousness that dominated him on stage worked against him. Resilient Jean Sibelius decided to moderate his soloist aspirations and progressively target his efforts towards composition.

Jean Sibelius (1865 - 1957)

Sibelius, the composer
By the early years of the nascent twentieth-century, Sibelius had already composed several choral symphonies and was beginning to reap success and national recognition with his first two orchestral symphonies – out of a total of seven composed over the course of his life. International recognition would come with his most famous work to this day, the tone poem Finlandia, a work that revealed to the world the poetic mastery of the composer, and that became the starting point of a rapt nationalist sentiment, of which Jean Sibelius will be an exalted protagonist.

The Violin Concerto
Nonetheless, the musician had not forgotten the violin forever, and the violin, for his part, waited for him solicitously. His Violin Concerto, premiered in 1905 in Berlin under the baton of Richard Strauss, became a small masterpiece that brought him immense popularity. Although, he had to face the fight for the stages fore the rising enthusiasm that avant-garde music of the time was arousing, before which Sibelius had to stand shielded in the virtuosity and depth without outbursts of his music.

For this reason, it has been said that Sibelius' style is conservative and his restricted harmonic language and his music are not very complex, compared to that of his contemporaries. The German theorist and also musician Theodor Adorno (author of nine short pieces) went so far as to call him an amateur and outdated composer. On the other hand, Béla Bártok, who was a musician and not a theoretician, did not hesitate to place Sibelius among the great composers of his time. But all this didn't matter at all to Sibelius, who used to point out: "Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected to a critic."

Movements:
00:00  Allegro moderato
16:31  Adagio di molto
25:34  Allegro ma non tanto

The rendition is by Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim.