Live blog: The Complete Sibelius Symphonies

C.R.E.A.M. get the money. Dollar dollar bill y’all.

Excessive amounts of free time allow for excessively random things like listening to the complete symphonies of Sibelius in one night. And if you’re gonna go for it, you might as well go for it: what follows is a live blog of my personal encounter with the music of the Man from Up North. Seven symphonies. Seven conductors. Seven orchestras. Four different formats. Prepare yourself for 3400 words of stream-of-consciousness inanity. Here we go…

The forgotten man?

Beam me up, Sir Alexander Gibson

Anyone who knows my personal tastes in conductors knows that my favorites are a bit of an obscure lot.  I honestly don’t consider myself a contrarian by nature, nor do I think there’s any sort of cachet in appreciating some hidden gems.  I love the big dogs, too.  Early on in my classical music life, I was drawn in by Leonard Bernstein, then I hated him because I thought he deviated from the score too much, and now I love him again because he reaches musical and emotional peaks no one else has been able to.  I love Gustavo Dudamel’s enthusiasm and charisma if not his music-making (he has PLENTY of time to get there, though).  But there are some really wonderful musicians who spent their entire careers in the shadows of more famous contemporaries (as my boy Otmar Suitner did with Karajan), and their legacies have become obscured.