BBCSO/Oramo Total Immersion: Sibelius the Storyteller review – hair-raising climaxes and soaring intensity

Barbican, London
A day of concerts led by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra explored the Finnish composer’s tone poems and songs, and made for a vivid - and special - experience

The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Total Immersion days are usually devoted to contemporary music, but the first of this season’s events at the Barbican focused on a composer who died 65 years ago, and who effectively had stopped writing music 30 years before that. Sibelius’s stature among the greatest of 20th-century composers rests primarily on his symphonies, but these four concerts explored the narratives behind his tone poems and songs.

The two programmes given by the BBCSO under its chief conductor Sakari Oramo provided the heft of the day, but there were other contributions too. Some of Sibelius’s solo songs, all settings in Swedish (the composer’s first language) of Finland’s national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg, were performed by students from the Guildhall School, alongside melodramas from opposite ends of his composing career, the 1893 Nights of Jealousy, for reciter, soprano and piano trio, and A Lonely Ski Trail, from 1925, with piano accompaniment. And later the BBC Singers, conducted by Owain Park, offered a selection of unaccompanied choral settings by Sibelius and also by his pupils Leevi Madetoja and Toivo Kuula.

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