Citazione di: feidhelm il Sabato 7 Mar 2015, 13:49:47La Quinta!Bravissima!
E per citare dal meraviglioso libro di Alex Ross "The rest is noise"
The second movement of the Fifth provides a spell of calm, although beneath the surface a significant new idea is coming to life—a swaying motif of rising-and-falling intervals, which the horns pick up in the finale and transform into the grandest of all Sibelian themes. The composer called it his "swan hymn"; he recorded it in his diary next to a description of sixteen swans flying in formation over Ainola. "One of my greatest experiences!" he wrote. "Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon. . . . That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider." The swans reappeared three days later: "The swans are always in my thoughts and give splendor to [my] life. [It's] strange to learn that nothing in the whole world affects me—nothing in art, literature, or music—in the same way as do these swans and cranes and wild geese. Their voices and being."
The swan hymn transcends the depiction of nature: it is like a spiritual force in animal form. When the horns introduce the theme, during a flurry of action in the strings, it's as if they had always been playing it, and the listener had only begun to hear it. A moment later, a reduced version of the theme is heard in the bass register of the orchestra at one-third the tempo, creating another hypnotic Sibelian effect of layered time.
