The BBC has five major symphony orchestras, and the London-based Symphony Orchestra can be considered the quintet's flagship. Founded in 1930, the names of its principal conductors alone speak volumes, including Adrian Boult, Antal Doráti, Colin Davis, Pierre Boulez, Andrew Davis and, since 2013, Sakari Oramo fromFinland. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is best known to international audiences for its performances at the London Proms, where it traditionally performs the First and Last Nights. It also focuses on new music, premiering works by composers ranging from Schnittke to Rihm, and has been awarding residencies to composers since 2000. The orchestra's artistic portfolio also includes opera performances, family concerts and film music. CLOSE

Sakari Oramo first stepped into the international spotlight in 1998 as Sir Simon Rattle's successor on the podium of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Since then, the Helsinki-born Oramo has become one of the world's leading conductors. After ten years in Birmingham, he moved to the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and in 2013 also took over the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he continues to be active in his native Finland, where he launched the West Coast Kokkola Opera as an alternative opera project in 2006. Interestingly, Oramo did not come to conducting directly; he began his training during his time as concertmaster of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. There, as a stand-in on the conductor's podium, he made such an impression that he was soon given the orchestra's direction. CLOSE

If it is true that Sibelius's personal circumstances are reflected in his symphonies, the Third takes on the significance of a resting place. Thanks to his successes at home and abroad, Sibelius was able to purchase a country house near Helsinki in 1904, and it was here that the new symphony was written, a work of almost classical balance. Behind the inviting façade, however, the compositional strategies of the future were already lurking: formal experiments, a constant metamorphosis of themes, a cautious departure from the major-minor system. What seems so startlingly new in the following symphony is already laid out here.

For a long time, Jean Sibelius was perceived exclusively as a representative of a national culture, as a Finnish composer par excellence. That he was much more, namely that he made an independent contribution to the history of Western music, this view only gradually became accepted. Thus, the 1st Symphony of the 33-year-old consciously takes up models such as Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Bruckner and enriches their models with his own themes and tonalities. It is already evident here how the symphonist Sibelius amalgamates Central European tradition, Nordic flair and the personal into a new whole.

The fact that Jean Sibelius, after completing his Symphony No. 3, intensively studied the work of the European avant-garde - Debussy, Mahler and Schoenberg are worthy of mention - can be heard in the work that follows. Instead of themes, Sibelius works here with short motives, with whole-tone scales or bitonality; at the heart of the symphony is the tritone interval. The abrupt, often barren tonal language that followed from these measures caused irritation at the premiere in 1911. Today, the Fourth is considered one of Sibelius' major works: a breathtakingly individual symphonic contribution on the threshold of modernity.

Like Brahms, Jean Sibelius followed a dark-toned symphonic first with a much brighter, friendly D major symphony. The pastoral mood of the first movement and the serenity of the third were associated early on with the composer's stay in Italy in 1901. Shadows, on the other hand, lie over the slow movement, and in the finale it takes a long time for the home key to assert itself against all odds. No wonder Finnish listeners interpreted this as an echo of their national liberation struggle. To this day, the Second is one of Sibelius' most popular creations.

Even if the 5th Symphony by Jean Sibelius once again strikes a more authoritative tone than its predecessor and culminates in a solemn finale, this cannot hide the fact that its creator has finally emancipated himself from the ballast of tradition. Formally, he goes his own way, combining four movements into three and subjecting them to a highly unusual tempo regime. Nevertheless, the Fifth was and still is very much in the public's favor: because it was seen as reflecting the spirit of optimism after Finland's independence (1917), but also the upheavals and hardships of that time.

That Jean Sibelius as a symphonist eventually had nothing more to say is a prejudice that has long persisted. At first glance, his Sixth, completed in 1923, is again oriented to the classical four-movement form. The detailed work, however, has little to do with tradition: Sibelius develops the entire work from a single motif, an ascending scale. Everything is change, constant metamorphosis; moreover, strictly speaking, the symphony is not in D minor, but in the old church key of Dorian - music of restrained passion, but always highly exciting.

Jean Sibelius's symphonic finale consistently continues the path of the 6th symphony finished shortly before. From the thematic germ cells introduced at the beginning, ever new entities grow through constant metamorphosis; instead of the originally planned three movements, the symphony consists of a single large movement in which everything is connected to everything else. The work is structured by three solemn trombone calls at the end of each section, behind which probably hides a bow to Aino Sibelius, the woman who endured all the self-doubt, eccentricity and alcoholism of her artist husband.