I may be moving into shaky territory here, this being a Forum of Adoration, but I checked the

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and I'm pretty sure fair criticism is OK...

That said, are there pieces out there by Sibelius that you don't like?

Be fair, be nice, but honest criticism is what this thread is about. Also, perhaps someone will list someone else's favourite... and that someone else will guide that first someone towards a new appreciation of a neglected piece.
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Personally, I don't like Rakastava very much, I find the first movement almost Elgarianly lush, the second movement a poor man's Night Ride or Karelia, while the third movement strikes me as a Mendelssohnian Song without words without the song.

All in all, if I simply listened to the music without knowledge of the subtext, I would be completely baffled as to what the music is supposed to be communicating, both in musical and extra-musical terms.

Horses for courses, I suppose - though you must have heard some pretty weird performances if they made the first movement sound Elgarian!

To dispense with any of JS's works would be a pity, bit if push comes to shove I would have to vote for some of the Op.58 piano pieces and Op.61 songs. There are some good individual items in each opus but overall I find them an uneasy mixture of style and content, not sure whether they are expressionistic (in the Fourth Symphony manner) or character pieces. Both sets were composed in some haste so perhaps it's not surprising that they are uneven.

I have a recording of the A minor and D minor string quartets on BIS and I have never been able to get into them. They just don't seem to have anything that stands out; makes them memorable.

Horses for courses, naturally, but don't give up on the chamber music on the basis of that recording (Sophisticated Ladies). It's technically well played but the Swedes are far too respectful and serious. In Swedish there's a worl 'lagom' which theoretically means 'just right' but in practice - in my experience - often implies 'bland, neutral, lacking in anything that people might object to' (a bit lilke baby food). Sibelius gives us hot chili, not curdled milk.

For reference:

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- somewhat underdeveloped...

Gratuitous Album Cover:

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Re: Sophisticated Ladies: I wondered if it might be the performance, not the pieces. The BIS CD cover is nothing like the picture above; very conservative as with most BIS covers.

Re: "lagom" Sounds like "correct\e" in French; means "normal, functional, acceptable; nothing special."

I am loath to name any work by Johan Christian Julius Sibelius that I dislike, but if I am honest, J. S's funeral march 'In Memoriam' opus 59 [1909 rev. 1910] is not a favourite.
Its not just that it reminds me of death, as I love pieces such as 'The death of Melisande'. 'In Memoriam' does seem pretty unique in Sibelius's output, perhaps its the Mahlerian element that puts me off!--kullervopete.

Thanks for reviving this long-dead thread, kullervopete. Getting back to my first post, I am giving Rakastava a second chance, as I have programmed it for my orchestra next season. We will be playing it in February 2009 as part of a Valentine's Day concert. Perhaps studying and performing it will bring me closer to the work than listening has.

This is hard to answer.

If I had to pick ONE piece as my least favorite, it would probably be Valse triste. Not because it's poorly written...quite to the contrary. But it's the most "pop" of all of Sibelius's pieces and it's so over-exposed. It's become a cliche unto itself over the year and it's a shame because whenever I hear it I cringe. It's the crowining jewel fo every two-bit "BEST OF SIBELIUS" compilation. It is to Sibelius what the NUTCRACKER is to Tchaikovsky.

In

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thead, kullervopete takes me to town on my initial thoughts about Rakastava, which have now admittedly changed.

So takings its place as a piece that I have yet to develop an affinity for: Spring Song. Perhaps I'll perform it in 2 years and kullervopete can remind us once again of this thread...

Naw, Spring Song is too pleasant a work not to like. It's like pure sugar for those with a sweet tooth.

Valse triste though, God love it. The music itself isn't bad, it's just SOOO overplayed on "Best of" recordings. OK, so Finlandia is too, but the Valse can;t hold a candle to the drama and power of Finlandia.

Its so easy to underestimate just what a tiny masterpiece Sibelius's Valse triste really is. I was re-reading Prof. Hans Redlich's talk the other day 'A view of Sibelius' which was originally broadcast by the BBC in 1968. I think Redlich's thoughts on the Valse triste are worth quoting. Redlich was discussing Kajanus's concert that preceded Mahlers by only one night in 1907 and might have included Valse triste.

'In 1907 that piece 'had only just began the long life that took it into the teashops of Europe and America'. Mahler would probably have disliked it because of its stylistic connections with earlier waltzes by Chopin and Tchaikovsky, with their inevitable undertones of the drawing-room. He might even have disliked its mannerisms of harmony all the more as being applied to a slow waltz.
He would probably have felt embarrassed by its very beginning-so much at variance with earlier models of a slow waltz-with its nine bars of pedal-point on the wrong note in the bass: a G sharp, the note most distant from the real tonic G natural, belatedly reached only at bar 23. Mahler would have thought it most unusual to hear the restatement of the chromatic waltz tune, starting at bar 25 a semitone higher than the first time. Finally, he would have been rather puzzled by the fact that the waltz tune's fatalistic refrain is restated in A flat major at the end of the first paragraph, returning each time in a different key until at last reaching the tonic of G only in the final bars.
Mahler, in his presumably negative frame of mind, might easily have missed the evolutionary derivation of this Valse triste from two earlier pieces by Chopin, which he must have been familiar with: the macabre slow waltz in A minor, Op. 34 No.2, and the G flat major trio section in the scherzo of the Piano Sonata in B flat minor, Op.35 with the famous funeral march.
If the first piece acted as a catalyst for the general atmosphere of doom prevailing in Valse triste, the second shows an actual structural likeness to Sibelius: the inner interval of a reiterated falling second underpinned by a pedal point on G flat. However, while Chopin begins his slow waltz-like trio episode unambiguously on the tonic of its new key of G flat, Sibelius starts his Valse triste-ostensibly conceived in G-very ambiguously on G sharp, first bare, later repeated with a super-imposed chord of fourths, a most unusual sound in 1903, the year in which Schoenberg avowedly included chords of the fourth for the first time in his tone poem Pelleas et Melisande. I am convinced that it was this propensity for the fourth as an harmonic constituent throughout the piece-together with Sibelius's unusual method of key contrast-which account for the immense popularity of Valse triste'.

Lucid comments on Sibelius's Valse triste, and from a German musicologist to boot! sometimes we can take the perfection and wonder of this little piece for granted.--kp

Valse Triste was my first introduction to Sibelius when I was a teenager. I will freely admit that I still love it. For me, the meloncholy of it sets it apart from other waltzes by other composers. It suits my preference for meloncholy and dissonance in music. If ever I seek to introduce friends to Sibelius for the first time, Valse Triste is the piece I pick, especially if they are not big "classical" music people.

Badger

Valse triste may be my least favorite Sibelius work, but it doesn't mean I hate it. I do not listen to it frequently though, because I have just heard it too many times; it's not fresh to me anymore. Weird, because I have heard Finlandia many times, the Swan many time, Karelia many time...you know...the stuff that always appears on "Sibelius's Greatest Hits" types of discs. But, for some reason, I don't tire of those.

When I heard Valse triste the first time, I really was drawn by it. And I probably will be again one day. Just give me some time!

Tapkaara, take all the time you want, but please hurry up with the 'Musette' bagpipe solo Badger, nice to hear from you again and I agree with you that the Valse triste is a good introduction to Sibbe.--kp

If you're feeling overexposed to Valse triste, try putting on the original version for a change. I remember the first time I heard the original: it was the (unannounced) encore at a concert in the Lahti Church of the Cross, after a programme of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Tapiola – you can easily guess the conductor, yes, that’s right – just before recording those works. I'd seen the original Valse triste score before, but in performance the greater simplicity of the melodic lines and the sweetness of the strings without flute or clarinet were wholly entrancing – one of those very rare concert moments that I'll remember for the rest of my life.

Oh yes, I do have the original version of Valse triste. We'll give it a whirl.

Andrew B wrote:

If you're feeling overexposed to Valse triste, try putting on the original version for a change. I remember the first time I heard the original: it was the (unannounced) encore at a concert in the Lahti Church of the Cross, after a programme of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Tapiola – you can easily guess the conductor, yes, that’s right – just before recording those works. I'd seen the original Valse triste score before, but in performance the greater simplicity of the melodic lines and the sweetness of the strings without flute or clarinet were wholly entrancing – one of those very rare concert moments that I'll remember for the rest of my life.

Alternatively, you could always listen to Segerstam's (Danish) recording on Chandos - he takes it really slow and gravely, giving it real stature, then speeds up for the "finale" to great effect. It doesn't sound much like a salon piece in his hands!

hangos wrote:

Andrew B wrote: If you're feeling overexposed to Valse triste, try putting on the original version for a change. I remember the first time I heard the original: it was the (unannounced) encore at a concert in the Lahti Church of the Cross, after a programme of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and Tapiola – you can easily guess the conductor, yes, that’s right – just before recording those works. I'd seen the original Valse triste score before, but in performance the greater simplicity of the melodic lines and the sweetness of the strings without flute or clarinet were wholly entrancing – one of those very rare concert moments that I'll remember for the rest of my life. Alternatively, you could always listen to Segerstam's (Danish) recording on Chandos - he takes it really slow and gravely, giving it real stature, then speeds up for the "finale" to great effect. It doesn't sound much like a salon piece in his hands!

I have not heard that recording...sounds like an interesting take on the work.

Welcome to the forum, by the way!!!

Tapkaara,
many thanks for your warm welcome to this chilly but bracing musical world!