Sibelius: The Symphonies; Wiener Philharmoniker, Lorin Maazel

"Sibelius was born into a culture without a musical tradition and the style which he assimilated as a student of composition was Teutonic. His inspiration, however, came from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala (from which he took material for his symphonic poems), from Finnish poetry and from the folk music of his homeland. Yet while his music evokes the vastness and often the bleakness of Finnish landscapes, it does not derive directly from folk-song. The technical means he uses are strikingly individual, just as the music which results from their use is more the expression of a personal sensibility than the manifestation of national characteristics. He made plain his own views on symphonic composition in a conversation he had with Mahler in Helsinki in 1907. Mahler declared that 'the symphony must be like a world ...,' but Sibelius said that what he admired in a symphony was 'severity of form, and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motifs" (CD notes by Timothy Day).
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