SIBELIUS: Tapiola / En Saga / Oceanides / Pohjola's Daughter - Iceland Symphony Orchestra

Sibelius’s tone poems cover his entire creative career, and contain some of his most dramatic and atmospheric music. En Saga, the composer’s first purely orchestral success, is an initially delicate then dramatic evocation of nature. Pohjola’s Daughter was inspired by one of the legends of the Norse epic, the Kalevala, wherein the magician Väinämöinen meets Pohjola’s Daughter on his way home and falls in love with her. To win her hand he must perform a series of impossible tasks, which he fails and sadly continues his journey alone. The Bard is short and contemplative in mood, without explicit programme. Based on Homeric epic rather than Nordic saga, The Oceanides evokes the nature of the sea, from calm breezy moods to thundering tempests. Tapiola is the last of Sibelius’s symphonic poems, a brilliantly evocative depiction of the Northern landscape and especially of its forests.