ITS LAUREATE OF MUSIC

Radio Record, 15 July 1938, Page 19

ITS LAUREATE OF MUSIC

ALL THE GRIM MAGIC OF. FINLAND IS MIRRORED IN WORKS OF SIBELIUS .

[F we had to choose one man, by the votes of the whole population, as the representative English composer of our time, Sir Edward Elgar would head the list. Finland, faced with such a task, would select Sibelius without having to stop and think. He is their laureate, a national hero, in a way it is hard for us to realise; a thoroughbred son of the race, descended from the strong-limbed, stout-hearted Jarls-of old. Nurtured in the tradition and the lore of his own grim, and-richly poetic land, he most fitly represents its very spirit. His music.is racial as no other has yet been; in it the land of a thousand © lakes, with its vast forests and wide moors, its granite and its long seashore, are crystallised as though by the stern hand of Finland’s long dark winter. A man of few words, he is not fond of having himself written about; nor is there any need for that, .His music ean tell far better than any other language the manner of man who has, for the first time, given’his country a great place in the world’s music. But it must not be thought that he is never.genial and sunny. There is his Fifth Symphony to prove that Sibelius has a different side. This symphony was commissioned ‘by the Finnish Government to celebrate the eomposer’s fiftieth birthday. It is probably the easiest of the composer’s

later works to understand at a first hearing. The music of this Fifth. Symphony’. is Sibelius in his most melodic, most genial, and least complex mood. Highly personal as everything Sibelius

writes is hound to be, the work strikes the note of spontaneous beauty before that of profundity. ~ At 1YA -on July: 22, "Symphony No. 5 in E Flat " by Sibelius ‘will be played by the London Sym--phony Orchestra.