Silence of Järvenpää

The term for the thirty-year creative silence of Jean Sibelius after the publication of Tapiola (1926) until his death in 1957. After completing his Seventh Symphony and Tapiola, Sibelius worked on an Eighth Symphony that he likely destroyed in the 1940s and published nothing further. The Five Esquisses, Op. 114 (1929) are his last published works — piano sketches that, with hindsight, feel like a final farewell to composition.

The Op.114 Esquisses should be played as final words, not as occasional salon pieces. Their brevity and austerity are not limitations but the essence. Each one distils a Finnish landscape or season into a handful of bars; give each its full weight.