One of the hazards of this practice is that listening to old albums prompts you to buy new one. Hence Sufi, and hence this purchase, which came about when listening to another Sibelius album.
Not long after I ordered this CD I was struck by my obvious error. No one buys an album these days in hunt of just one track. If I thought it was Tapiola I wanted, why didn't I just go the iTunes Store? There are 26 versions of the piece there (interestingly ranging from under 15 minutess to over 20), so I could have chosen what seemed a promising one and paid less than a sixth of what I paid for even a cheap CD.
But no point in beating myself up about it now. And I got four other pieces into the bargain as well, including the spectacular En Saga. I love the shifts between brooding and moods and high drama in Sibelius's best pieces.
I didn't disclose last time how I first came to Sibelius as a fifteen-year-old. It was via an interview with Jon Anderson that the web tells me was written by the great Allan Jones, and published in Melody Maker on 27 September 1980 under the title "Confessions of an Astral Traveller". Here's the relevant excerpt:
He didn't sound at all pompous, but he was still capable of sounding wildly precious and not a little wet; what my mother would call half-soaked, I think. At one point, we'd been discussing Michael Herr's Dispatches. Anderson went on to explain how he'd always be caught up in the atmosphere of a really good book. "I remember when Yes were touring America," he said. "After the gigs, I'd just want to get back to the hotel room and get really stuck into some Tolkein, put on something by Sibelius in the background and really get into it." Never much of a Hobbit man myself, I just stared at my toe-caps, wondered when someone would offer me another drink; suggested we might as well start the interview.
I read Dispatches shortly after that, too. I may be embarrassed by the means of these discoveries, but I'm not by the ends. All that expensive schooling never inspired me to check these things out.
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