I am in Lahti, Finland, to give a talk at the Lahti Symphony's Sibelius Festival. I've been wanting to visit since I encountered Osmo Vänskä's revelatory BIS recordings with this orchestra in the early nineties — the original version of the Violin Concerto, the complete Tempest music, the first installments of what turned out to be a near-definitive cycle of the symphonies. I covered a Lahti chamber-ensemble concert for the New York Times in 1994 and later heard the full orchestra twice at Avery Fisher Hall. That a city with a population of under 120,000 has produced an orchestra of such quality is fairly stupendous. My topic here is "Sibelius in America," with emphasis on the somewhat extreme Nordic-he-man rhetoric of early supporters like Henry Taylor Parker, Olin Downes, and Lucien Price. Opposing that strain will be the cosmopolitan fandom of Morton Feldman, who, in a lecture at Darmstadt in 1984, famously prefaced a vocalization of the Fifth Symphony's swan theme with the remark: "The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical."
