Sibelius "Three Late Fragments"

[Alan Howe]

From MDT's website:

Illness prevented Sibelius from completing any major works in the last thirty years of his life. Manuscripts show, however, that he never stopped composing. Recorded here are three orchestral fragments prepared by Timo Virtanen from late sketches thought to be for Sibelius's legendary 'lost' 8th Symphony, destroyed by the composer in 1945. They offer a fascinating glimpse into the composer's creative imagination during a time when impaired health inhibited Sibelius from realising his rich musical visions.
http://www.mdt.co.uk/sibelius-symphonies-nos-1-7-three-john-storgards-chandos-records-3cds.html

Unfortunately, you have to buy the new Chandos complete set of Sibelius symphonies (BBC Philharmonic Manchester/John Storgards) to get these fragments, but at the advertised price, the set's a steal anyway.

[TerraEpon]

They are also on this CD which you can buy piecemeal at a small cost:
http://www.eclassical.com/composers/sibelius-jean/bis2065-24bit.html

And there's four of them. Actually two of them are pretty modern sounding, even more than almost anything else he wrote. Most of the rest of the CD is culled from the BIS complete edition, but it also has a couple very wonderful piano pieces that weren't recorded before (though one of the three is an earlier version of another piece).

[Alan Howe]

Thanks for that. Here's the BIS essay:
http://bis.se/BIS-2065-essay/BIS-2065_essay.pdf

[anssik]

You can hear at least some of the fragments reconstructed by Timo Virtanen through Youtube as well; type, for example, "Sibelius fragments"; these are the ones that Storgårds played with Helsinki Philharmonia a few years back. Incidentally, saying, as the notes do, that Sibelius was prevented from completing his eighth symphony due to illness looks suspicious to me. He did suffer, as we might now put it, from hand movement disorder, and some people have posthumously diagnosed it as essential tremor. But that hardly sufficed to seal the fate of the symphony. Anyway, this is grossly off topic here. 

[Alan Howe]

Please note: unfortunately MDT have altered the price of this set so that it is no longer particularly competitive.

[chill319]

If you haven't heard it lately, I recommend Sibelius's Surusoitto (Funeral Music) from ca. 1931 as a good "introduction" to the late Sibelius we can't hear. Like late Melartin, it's probably not fodder for this forum. What, then, of the version of Symphony 8 (with chorus, if memory serves) that Sibelius had professionally bound in two volumes some nine years after Surusoitto?