by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Happy Hanukkah!
Many events to list for Friday, December 8!
City Music (7:30 at Lakewood Congregational Church), Cyrus Chestnut & Friends: A Charlie Brown Christmas (7:30 at Severance Music Center), Akron Symphony & Choruses (7:30 at E.J. Thomas Hall), Procession of Advent Lessons & Carols (7:30 at Holy Trinity Lutheran, Akron and online), Accent a cappella (pictured, 7:30 at the Cleveland Museum of Art), Oberlin Collegium Musicum (7:30 in Fairchild Chapel and online), and Oberlin Orchestra (7:30 in Finney Chapel and online).
Visit our Concert Listings for details of these and other performances,
INTERESTING READ:
James Gaffigan, former Cleveland Orchestra assistant conductor (not the comedian), is the new Music Director of Berlin’s Komische Oper. In a rangy Van Magazine interview, Olivia Giovetti speaks with him about the art of anticipation, his hope for an overhaul of the symphonic concert format, and shoplifting Toscanini records from the Metropolitan Opera gift shop.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
Jean Sibelius was born on this date in 1865 in Hämeenlinna, Finland. He is considered the country’s greatest composer, one who has even played a role in shaping national identity, such that today is known as Finnish Music Day.
Sibelius — pictured here with an alarming case of bedhead — is most often remembered for works such as Finlandia and the Violin Concerto as well as for his seven symphonies. On that note, he conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony (in its original form) on his own 50th birthday, which was celebrated as a national holiday.
Less well-known, but seasonally appropriate, is his set of Christmas carols — the Five Christmas Songs, which he cataloged as his Opus 1 (despite the fact that later opus numbers precede these songs in date).
The carols were part of the Sibelius family’s holiday traditions, and perhaps it is a sign of the personal importance these works held for him that he continued to revise them until a few years before his death — despite the fact that he had largely stopped composing three decades earlier.
The fifth in the set, On hanget korkeat, nietokset (“High are the snowdrifts”), is one of the most beloved — a sentiment that the composer’s children agreed with, for it signaled to them that the holiday festivities were underway. Click here to listen to an arrangement by Erkki Nurminen, as performed by conductor Mikko Sidoroff and the Turku University Choir during an Advent concert in 2013. (And read more about Christmas at the Sibelius household here).
No. 5 is convenient to feature not only because it is one of the most famous from the set, but also because it’s the easiest one to search for with its single Finnish title. So buckle up — the other song that is particularly well-known, No. 4, might be identified five different ways: as Julvisa or Jouluvirsi (Swedish and Finnish for “Christmas carol”), or by its opening line Giv mig ej glans, ej guld, ej prakt in Swedish, En etsi valtaa, loistoa in Finnish, and “Give me no splendour, gold or pomp” in English.
But it’s Finnish Music Day after all, so have a listen here to En etsi valtaa, loistoa, as sung by the splendid Finnish baritone Jorma Hynninen.
Other anniversaries to mark on this date include three more birthdays: Mexican composer Manuel Maria Ponce (1882), Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů (1890), and Irish flutist James Galway (1939).
