Sibelius Piano Works

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Jean Sibelius

Label: Finlandia

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 69

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: 4509-98984-2

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
(3) Kyllikki, 'Lyric Pieces' Jean Sibelius, Composer
Jean Sibelius, Composer
Marita Viitasalo, Piano
(3) Sonatinas for Piano Jean Sibelius, Composer
Jean Sibelius, Composer
Marita Viitasalo, Piano
(2) Rondinos Jean Sibelius, Composer
Jean Sibelius, Composer
Marita Viitasalo, Piano
Sonata for Piano Jean Sibelius, Composer
Jean Sibelius, Composer
Marita Viitasalo, Piano
Finlandia Jean Sibelius, Composer
Jean Sibelius, Composer
Marita Viitasalo, Piano
This disc assembles some of the best of Sibelius’s piano music – Kyllikki and the three Sonatinas, Op. 67. These pieces enjoyed the advocacy of Wilhelm Kempff and Glenn Gould among others, though Kempff never committed them to disc. (Kempff, incidentally, stayed for a few days in the 1920s at Sibelius’s home, Ainola, where he was persuaded to play the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Schumann Fantasie sometimes several times in a day.) Sibelius’s countryman, the composer Selim Palmgren for whom the piano was a natural means of expression, wrote that “even in what for him were alien regions, [Sibelius] moves with an unfailing responsiveness to tone colour”. Marita Viitasalo plays with a natural and inborn sympathy for the idiom and my only small grumble concerns the recording balance. The instrument is a bit too closely observed for my taste, and one needs a more distant perspective.
It is false piety to include the transcription of Finlandia, made at a time when the piano arrangement served to disseminate music more widely, a function long since overtaken by the gramophone. Marita Viitasalo is an intelligent and sympathetic interpreter and, despite my reservation about the balance, her disc is perfectly recommendable.'

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