Zooming Sibelius

After four in-depth Zoom terms on Russian music, one on the Czechs and the most recent on the Hungarians, I decided that Finland had to be next. And while there are plenty of other fascinating musical voices, the name of Jean Sibelius towers above all others. While he only started learning to speak Finnish aged 9 at one of the country’s first national schools – Swedish was his mother tongue – Sibelius’s musical consistency is absolute, from the early masterpieces of the 1890s through to his turning away from all major works in the 1920s.

We’ll be following the adventure from its bracing start - including the programme symphony based on the exploits of one of the many ill-fated heroes in the national epic the Kalevala, Kullervo (depicted above on his way to war by Finland's greatest 19th centurty artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, like the portrait-plus below, hanging in wonderful house-museum Ainola) through to the supreme concentration of the Seventh Symphony and Tapiola, with excursions to the music of other Finnish composers both contemporary with Sibelius and of later generations.

Hopes are high for the kind of special guests who’ve been a feature of earlier courses – among them conductors Paavo Järvi, Vladimir Jurowski, Antonio Pappano and Robin Ticciati; pianists Pavel Kolesnikov, Alexander Melnikov, Steven Osborne and Samson Tsoy; violinists Alina Ibragimova and Josef Špaček; and harpist Jana Boušková. Certainly I'm wondering if the exceptionally busy Klaus Mäkelä can be persuaded to come along again after his energetic contribution to a Bartók class just before I heard him conduct the suite from The Miraculous Mandarin in Oslo. My rave for his new Sibelius symphonies set with the Oslo Philharmonic, now incontestably one of the world's top orchestras, should be out in the BBC Music Magazine soon. But there already fine cycles to choose from, including those by Berglund (twice), Järvis Neeme and Paavo, Kamu, Oramo and Saraste.

A wide range of works will be illustrated with excerpts on CD, DVD and YouTube. We begin next Thursday (28 May) at 2.30pm with the first of 10 two-hour classes. You don't have to attend live - you can received the video the day after. Either way, the fee is a modest £100 for the whole term (not bad at £5 an hour - and often we take the luxury of running on longer if the case, or the special guest, so demands). Email me at david.nice@usa.net ASAP to confirm a place

Swanning round the Scandies

Some would argue that Finland isn't strictly part of Scandinavia, but as it seems to be possible to include it, I can add it to a week of visiting embassies or ambassadors also representing Denmark, Norway and Sweden, courtesy of J. I'm not much of a one for too much 'canapes and mingling', a profession for some folk, but the Nordic countries do know how to celebrate Christmas in music as much as food and convivial atmosphere.

I'm not rating them from 1 to 10 as each had something different to offer. Strictly speaking, the event at the Danish Ambassador's residence - I call him Mick because he could have become a rock star and knew Jagger well, his wife Ingrid because she looks like La Bergman - was to augur well for Aarhus as European Capital of Culture next year (I actually missed the proper Christmas bash the following week because of a long and complicated eye test#). The Norwegians boasted a grand Christmas tree - they'd come hotfoot from lighting up the big one in Trafalgar Square -

and tables of sweet delights

as well as the chance to see the pretty lights within from the garden.

Perhaps more important, I met three people for the first time whom I liked a lot.

Ditto at the Finns', where the fish was heavenly.

Inevitably the Swedes has a trump card: the annual Santa Lucia ritual, lovely Swedish carols sung by excellent choristers in candlelight. I experienced it for the first time in Örebro a year ago and wrote a bit about the (rather recent) tradition in the blog entry on that visit.

Eventually I succumbed to joining the many pointing their cameras and smartphones at the ensemble and filmed the choir singing "Jul, jul, strålande jul", composed by Edvard Evers in 1921. Unfortunately it's too big a file to be uploaded here. So we'll make do with the pretty visuals.

The Swedish Ambassador's Residence at 21 Portland Place is one of the gems of the Adam brothers' original Georgian designs, with stunning decorative work both on the staircase

and on the ceilings of the main rooms.

Gustavus III , the same assassinated by Anckarstroem in Un ballo in maschera, got the seasonal Swedish getup

and the Christmas tree looks especially handsome below the grand staircase.

One more, this time outside the Richard Rogers restaurant and offices which are my entry-point on my bike to the Thames.

An advantage of neglecting to get out in these short days before the light has begun to fade is catching some spectacular winter sunsets. This one was already well underway when I reached the river

and the bend at Hammersmith revealed an especially fine pink beyond.

Here's a constant wonder of the route, Hammersmith Bridge (by Joseph Bazalgette, an 1887 replacement for the original by Tierney Clark, the same man who designed the Chain Bridge in Budapest)

with ducks

also caught looking back from the bridge to the Harrods Furniture Depository, saved by redevelopment as flats.

Which permits another riverside/sunset diversion, taken the previous Sunday after a very lively gathering at the Hermitage Basin home of the delightful Claudia and Stephen Pritchard. This is their outlook

and just beyond is London Bridge.

Heading east, I retraced steps taken on a Wapping walk with City of London Guide and erstwhile student Julia Kuznecow.

The centrepiece of the Wapping trail is undoubtedly the symmetrical terraces and garden of Pier Head,  once the main maritime entrance of the London Docks (built in 1805).

These were the homes of Dock Company officials, customs officers and merchants; now quite a few celebs live there (someone told me whom last week, and I've immediately forgotten).

Reverting to the day of the big Hammersmith sunset, as I cycled home I suddenly saw the last full moon of the year - still a supermoon - through the trees of Queen's Club Gardens

and in its full glory.

The next night I went out to see it again, and orange was the colour.

As I snapped away, an odd man who thought I was photographing him and stopped to chat told me his theories of how the moon was an illusion, a NASA-dominated conspiracy theory, and how he'd been reading on the internet that the earth was flat. Very Zeitgeisty, and of course the fight back against post-truth online is already under way.

From Finland

Sibelius, of course, will always be Suomiexport No. 1, but I'm also devoted to the three gifts I brought back from Finland. Tinned muikku (aka lake vendace) is a poor substitute for the fresh fried thing, which I was lucky to eat once again in a Helsinki restaurant:


Yet the above smoked miniatures were the best I've tasted in preserved form. Export No. 2 is this box of porridge oats, which made us realise how poor the Quaker stuff is. At the moment we're using an Irish variety, but when I can hie me down to the Finnish church in Rotherhithe, I can buy more of these (and I'm a sucker for the packaging).


Last but certainly most major is the piikkimatto Anneli marched me down to a hypermarket to buy at half-price on my last morning. It's a kind of fakir's bed of nails - each of the little circles has spikes which dig into bare flesh but fortunately don't make it bleed.


Sounds hideous, but it releases endorphins and also - if this doesn't sound like a contradiction - helps you sleep. It's uncomfortable at first but then a warmth spreads through your back and it's actually quite pleasant, until you rip yourself off it. J was very doubtful about this bizarre present but then he read a little snippet in Metro which touted it as a Reiki mat pioneered by an Englishman who's become some sort of guru and retailing at around £50. Of course the wretched thing probably costs about £3 to make, and mine was put together by slave labour in China, but I was pleased to pick it up for a mere 23 euros. Our alternative-minded blonde bombshell from Jerusalem, Juliette, who's introduced us to all our best holiday destinations including Auroville's Quiet Healing Centre near Pondicherry in south India, adored it when she visited last week. Here she is discreetly draped and blissed out.

Sibelius at home

200 words in a BBC Music Magazine article on my top composer houses won't do justice to the four-plus wonderful hours I spent last Thursday at Ainola, the home of Jean and Aino Sibelius just outside Jarvenpaa, half an hour's commuter train journey from Helsinki. So I thought I'd expand on the house, the paintings and some extraordinary tributes from Sibelius's confreres in several blog entries over time.

Hilkka Helminen, the house-museum's director, met me on an icy Jarvenpaa station platform in clear blue skies - the last day, as it turned out, of the extended Finnish winter. Her love and enthusiasm for the spirit of place seemed to be reflected by the other Finns I met - with one exception, who found the house 'oppressive'. I couldn't have disagreed with him more. On a sunny winter day, with the snow gleaming outside, light flooded in from all the big windows of Lars Sonck's humble national-romantic construction.


You approach the house up a snowy track through the wooded hill - or rather I, and a few privileged others, did at this time of year because it's only open to the public from May to September (the last visitors to sign the guest book were Olli Mustonen and his family). Without the cordons that marshal the many visitors in season, and with only Hilkka to guide me, it was just like being welcomed into someone's home by the housekeeper when the hosts were absent. Because Sibelius and his wife lived here from 1904 until his peaceful death in the downstairs bedroom on 20 September 1957, and because, following Aino's death at the age of nearly 98 in 1969, the descendants - who still visit and celebrate on birthdays - passed it on to the Finnish state with all contents intact, it has more the feel of a great artist's living home than any I've visited.


The drawing room is a homely mixture of inherited antique furniture, striking paintings and, crucially, the Steinway grand which replaced an upright in 1915, when 144 admirers of Sibelius clubbed together to buy it for his 50th birthday.


Curiously, the keyboard faces a grim painting, Rukous or Prayer by Oscar Parviainen, in which a young girl is claimed by death just as in Kuolema - and in real life, though the Sibeliuses' third daughter Kirsti was little more than a year old when she died. He claimed that he needed the reminder every day when he sat at the piano. No photograph was taken, so upstairs in Aino's bedroom, part of the house not open to the public, Kirsti is represented above the five daughters who lived by a Van Dyck child.


I'll mention some of the other pictures in a later entry. Now we move into the dining room, pictured with Hilkka in the foreground.


The great green fireplace is one of only two features on which Sibelius himself insisted. Apparently he 'heard' its colour in F major - I didn't know about his synesthesia - just as another Parviainen of a funeral cortege to the left apparently resounded in D major. The dining table is seen below with more treasure paintings behind lining the staircase wall


while a small table and a window seat helped me to place that 1915 photo I posted back in 2008 when I was working on Sibelius 6 for Radio 3's Building a Library.




Off the dining room is the big kitchen and the room for the two servants who stayed with the Sibeliuses for most of their time here and the bedroom in which Sibelius died with his second study (the first was upstairs), his familiar hat and cane on a chair in the corner (pictured above).


Adjoining bedroom and dining room is the comfortable library, converted from children's rooms in 1935.


I could hardly believe I was seeing the original of the triptych with the missing third panel by the great Akseli Gallen-Kallela.


It contains his symbolic (mis)interpretation of Sibelius's 'fairy tale' En Saga with the tousled, attractive portrait and the empty panel which Sibelius refused to fill with a quotation from the tone poem. More anon on the books and the gramophone collection.

We spent the whole morning there, and I was very surprised when Hilkka offered a return visit after lunch at the excellent catering school nearby. This was when we went through the contents of the 78s and I discovered still more wonders. She was also game enough to accompany me through the thigh-deep snow to the site of the graves of Sibelius and Aino, covered at this time of year, of course


and the sauna, designed by the multitalented Aino (whose gardening skills were not, of course, evident at this time of year).


It wasn't until 3.30 that Hilkka dropped me back at Jarvenpaa station.


I was rather amused by this quartet - the old stationmaster and his wife in the photos on the wall, the new generation beneath - in the comfortable waiting room.


Then I labelled my thoughts on the crowded train back, Luonnotar once again running through my head as it had on the outward journey, before stepping out at Helsinki's famous Central Station, designed by Eliel Saarinen and opened in 1919.


To help plan your essential trip to Jarvenpaa, there are further details and photos on the Ainola website. More can be found on the individual artworks at www.sibelius.fi.