The kind of thing that brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” Sibelius wrote his string quartet ‘Intimate Voices’ during a period of crisis, both financial and health. The Finlandia label has issued a two-CD set of Jean Sibelius's quartets.“It turned out as something wonderful. The New Helsinki Quartet plays the score with just the right mixture of passion and reserve the close attention it demands from a listener is rewarded richly. The Sibelius Academy Quartet plays with energy and sweetness, making a convincing case for these rarities.Īs for "Voces Intimae," it still seems one of the truly individual contributions to the quartet repertory - spare, mysterious, suffused throughout with rarefied winter light. The second and third quartets have often been compared to Tchaikovsky and Grieg but remind me more of Dvorak with their serenity, warmth and formal consistency. The first quartet is deeply indebted to the works of Haydn and Mozart - a student work, but from a youngster of enormous gifts. 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. 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. "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. 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. 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"). The songs are better, as are the works for violin and piano, but these, too, have yet to find much of an audience. 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 piano pieces in particular are interesting only in their very lack of interest. 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. 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. Composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) had one of the strangest careers in history.
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