147 years is a fine age.

A toast to the great man! I love his symphonies, but the 5th has always been a favourite. Listening to it right now! Never could make much sense of the 6th, Benjamin Britten wondered if Sibelius was drunk when he wrote it.

Sibelius will always live in my heart for his magnificent Violin Concerto with a finale that Tovey memorably called 'a Polonaise for polar bears'.

The Sibelius Violin Concerto from 1905 is a seminal work of the 20th century, only matched 5 years later by Elgar's gorgeous contribution. But the 1930's gave us Stravinsky (1931), Berg (1935), and Bartok (1937). A rich harvest, if none of them particularly displace Sibelius and Elgar.

I visited Finland in April of 2003, but missed the opening of the Sibelius home for the season by two weeks.

Happy Birthday! I love you more than I have ever expressed.

Actually, he might have been. That man was a heavy drinker and smoker. I'm reading a biography on him, and it says that he drank a lot in 1920's, when the symphony was composed.

one of my favorite composers.. valse triste and swan of tunela{sp} 2 of my favorite pieces in the world

A guilty pleasure of mine.

Do you suppose he destroyed his 8th symphony in a drunken stupor?

That would have been, of course, a lot later, but I was just wondering.

For all that, everything was so musically microcosmed in the 7th symphony (it is a startling work of genius), and when it says as much in 21 minutes as any Mahler symphony, what does one do for an encore?

My favorite orchestral composer.
I could have chosen just about anything he ever wrote but this is in memory of Patrick Moore who died today.For the benefit of people living outside the UK, Patrick Moore was a slightly eccentric and much loved astronomer and broadcaster.

Many thanks, timmy. A sad loss, one of my uni profs knew Patrick Moore. He played the piano -amongst many other things- and wrote two operettas.

I am listening to the 2nd movement of Sibelius 3, it seems a fitting memorial.

And I thought you were going to talk about the scoring program...! :facepalm:

I bet most people who watched the program(me) religiously for the past several decades still don't know that the theme tune is from Sibelius's Pelléas et Mélisande (At the Castle Gate).

If I remember correctly, his wife was present when he threw several compositions into the fire. I think she would have stopped him if he had been intoxicated.

I read somewhere that some of the themes from his 8th Symphony got recycled in his late piano music.....