Suite in A major for string trio (1889)

Early Sibelius used to mean works like Kullervo, En Saga and Karelia, written well before the First Symphony but after the composer had completed his studies at the Helsinki Music Institute. The comparatively recent discovery of scores from his early twenties, a period abundant in chamber music and piano pieces, has changed our perceptions of early Sibelius. The Suite in A major, a student exercise first performed at the Institute in 1889, is a particularly interesting example. The distinguished Helsinki critic Karl Flodin was impressed by it, even if he judged its melodic material “rather far-fetched and fragmentary,” while Busoni, who taught piano at the Institute at the time, found his attention drawn to “something well above the level of student work.”

As an ambitious violinist himself, Sibelius knew how to write for strings, as is clear from the way the violin, or later the viola, so deftly weaves its supple melody through the busy background figuration supplied by the other two instruments at the beginning of the Prelude. A striking structural peculiarity is that what promises to be a contrasting middle section turns out to be the second of two halves, the movement ending with allusions back to the main theme rather than a full-scale repeat of the opening. The Andante con moto, a gently paced miniature march is more conventionally constructed in ternary form with a robustly scored reprise of the first section following a briefly contrapuntal central episode. Apparently modelled on Viennese classical precedent in the outer sections, the Menuetto includes a surprisingly agitated trio section.

The Suite originally ended with an Air and a Gigue but the violin part for both movements is now lost. The Gigue can, in theory, be reconstructed but what Sibelius really wrote can only be a matter for conjecture.