Towards Freedom

Missy Mazzoli knows that you don’t have to shout to make a powerful noise. ‘I like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture’, she says, and her haunting musical reflection on youth and age, memory and emotion, is the perfect way to launch a concert that wears its heart proudly on its sleeve. Sibelius’s Finlandia was so stirring that the authorities in 19th-century Finland tried to ban it. But for guest conductor Enrique Mazzola the real drama will be within, as he conducts Sibelius’s volcanic First Symphony. Nordic Noir goes widescreen, in glorious colour.