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Driving home from school the other night, I caught the beginning of a “Live at the Concertgebouw” broadcast featuring, of course, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.  I tuned in just as the Symphony No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 82 of Sibelius was beginning.  This is one of my favorite symphonies, and I will explain why.  Without getting into the musicological debate surrounding this work (the basics of which you can read about here), suffice it to say that the whole symphony is full of wonderful ideas.

Its first theme begins with horns, then adds woodwinds, and it is quite evocative.  Listen:

That theme often gets glossed over, however, and when it does, I think it hurts the whole performance, since the stage is not set for what is to come.  To illustrate how often this theme is trivialized in performance, I have at least five different recordings of this symphony, and only one of them comes close to sounding the way I think the piece should.

I don’t have enough server space to accommodate a complete analysis of every movement, so let’s skip ahead to the last movement.   Listen to the way this fantastic theme starts in the lowest strings, then opens out with the horns, finally joined by the winds:

That’s magic!

Charting its development, the same theme is heard again later in the movement, dramatically transformed:

Finally, everybody’s favorite part about this symphony, and one of its most original ideas, is the great coda, where Sibelius threw in the whole orchestra, brought back the triple-time theme again, and concluded everything with an excruciatingly intense cadence.  Listen to the last few bars; it’s the greatest thing ever:

That’s good stuff.  Who’d have thought that the man who composed it would look so much like a comic book villain?