Klaus Mäkelä is awarded the
2022 Sibelius Prize

This concert is set up in connection with Klaus Mäkelä being awarded the Sibelius Prize 2022. Note that this program differs from the day before. 

Igor Stravinsky wrote the ballet music for The Fairy's Kiss in 1928, and the performance premiered in Paris the same year. The plot is based on H.C. Andersen's fairy tale The Ice Maiden, and the music is a tribute to Pyotr Tchaikovsky on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of his death. Stravinsky selected a bunch of melodies that had not been orchestrated before, from Tchaikovsky's songs and piano pieces. The ballet performance lives on in the orchestral version Divertimento from 1934.

The French composer Ernest Chausson (1855–1899) was a close friend of the Belgian Eugène Ysaÿe, the great violin virtuoso of his time. In the 1890s, Ysaÿe encouraged Chausson to write a violin concerto for him, but Chausson found it too overwhelming a task. Instead, he wrote Poème – a shorter work for violin and orchestra. The play became Chausson's first major success in his hometown of Paris when Ysaÿe played it there in 1897.

In 1922, Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) met the Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, great-niece of the violin legend Joseph Joachim, during a tour in London. She entertained the composer with folk tunes from her home country late into the night, and Ravel was so thrilled that he wrote a virtuoso violin rhapsody for her. It was titled Tzigane, and she premiered it in London in 1924. The original version was for violin and piano, and Ravel orchestrated the piano part the same year.