But it is in his
orchestral works, for he is determined an orchestral writer, that he has
fixed it most successfully. There has been no composer, not Brahms in
his German forest, nor Rameau amid the poplars of his silver France, not
Borodin on his steppes, nor Moussorgsky in his snow-covered fields under
the threatening skies, whose music gives back the colors and forms and
odors of his native land more persistently. The orchestral compositions
of Sibelius seem to have passed over black torrents and desolate
moorlands, through pallid sunlight and grim primeval forests, and become
drenched with them. The instrumentation is all wet grays and blacks,
relieved only by bits of brightness wan and elusive as the northern
summer, frostily green as the polar lights. The works are full of the
gnawing of bassoons and the bleakness of the English horn, full of
shattering trombones and screaming violins, full of the sinister rolling
of drums, the menacing reverberation of cymbals, the icy glittering of
harps. The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely
realized recall the ruggedness and hardiness and starkness of things
that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the
wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering
sunlight.
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