Unbinding Sibelius (I)

It may not raise many eyebrows for a leading conductor approaching his 50th birthday never to have undertaken a complete Sibelius symphony cycle. But for such a person to be the leading Finnish conductor of his generation is rather astonishing. Esa Pekka Salonen is the case in point. As a young man he wanted to get as far away as he could from Sibelius. So unbearably overwhelming seems to have been the influence of the composer in the culture of his homeland that he went as far away as Italy to escape from it. "I wanted to get out of Finland, as far as I could, to a different culture where Sibelius would not permeate every molecule of the musical oxygen I breathed" confesses Salonen in the written introduction to 'Sibelius Unbound!', the cycle which proclaims the late conversion of Salonen to the composer he so tried to avoid. After…