SIBELIUS EIGHTH SYMPHONY?

posted by James Reel

Finnish music scholars--or at least a couple of them--think they may have found enough sketches to piece together the Eighth Symphony of Sibelius, something the composer was known to have been working on in his later years, but it was believed that he'd ultimately burned almost all of what he'd done. Recently, though, experts have been sifting through some 800 pages of sketches Sibelius didn't burn, and there's some loose talk of stitching them together into a full symphony. Caution is in order. How can they be sure that all these pages really are related to the symphony, and not other things? Of those that can be connected to the symphony, how do they know that these are not rejected scraps, and that the destroyed manuscript contained quite different material? Nevertheless, they are forging ahead, and three fragments adding up to about two minutes of material have been performed and can be found online. Read this article for the background, then check out the video by going to this page and clicking the button below the photo.