Recorded in 1934. Georg Schnéevoigt, Finnish National Orchestra

I. Tempo molto moderato, quasi adagio
II. Allegro molto vivace 11:07
III. Il tempo largo 14:50
IV. Allegro 26:38

Georg Lennart Schnéevoigt (8 November 1872 -- 28 November 1947) was a Finnish conductor and cellist, born in Vyborg, Grand Duchy of Finland, which is now in Russia.
Schnéevoigt began his career as a cellist performing throughout Europe in the 1890s. He was principal cellist of the Helsinki Philharmonic from 1896 to 1902. After this, he conducted many orchestras including the Kaim Orchestra (now the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra), Riga Philharmonic Orchestra which he founded, the Stockholm Concert Society (later the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra), the Sydney Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. From 1930 until his death in 1947, Schnéevoigt was chief conductor of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra.

Schnéevoigt was a close friend of composer Jean Sibelius and often performed Sibelius's orchestral music. He conducted the first performance in Finland of Luonnotar in January 1914. He discovered the manuscripts of Sibelius's tone poems "Lemminkäinen and the Maidens" and "Lemminkäinen in Tuonela", which had been thought lost, and gave their first performance since 1894. He also made the first recording of Sibelius's Symphony No. 6. His passion for the music of Sibelius was such that he cried when conducting his works.


The Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63. Written between 1910 and 1911, it was premiered in Helsinki on 3 April 1911 by the Philharmonia Society, with Sibelius conducting.

The interval of the tritone dominates the melodic and harmonic material of the piece. It is stated immediately, in a dark phrase for cellos, double basses and bassoons, rising C-D-F♯-E over a hard unison C. Most of the themes of the symphony involve the tritone; in the finale, much of the harmonic tension arises from a collision between the keys of A minor and E♭ major, a tritone apart. The bitonal clash between A and E♭ in the finale's recapitulation leads to tonal chaos in the coda, in which the rival notes C, A, E♭ and F♯ each strive for ascendancy in a series of grinding dissonances with many clashes between major and minor thirds. In the end it is the insistence of C natural (the note with which the work so strikingly began) that forces the movement and the symphony to close in a desolate A minor.

Many commentators have heard in the symphony evidence of struggle or despair. Harold Truscott writes, "This work ... is full of a foreboding which is probably the unconscious result of ... the sensing of an atmosphere which was to explode in 1914 into a world war." Sibelius also had recently endured terrors in his personal life: in 1908, in Berlin, he had a cancerous tumour removed from his throat. Timothy Day writes that "the operation was successful, but he lived for many years in constant fear of the tumour recurring, and from 1908 to 1913 the shadow of death lay over his life." Other critics have heard bleakness in the work: one early Finnish critic, Elmer Diktonius, dubbed the work the Barkbröd symphony, referring to the famine in the previous century during which starving Scandinavians had had to eat bark bread to survive.

According to the biographer Erik W. Tawaststjerna, the Symphony reflects the psychoanalytical and introspective era when Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson stressed the meaning of the unconscious, and he calls the Fourth Symphony "one of the most remarkable documents of the psychoanalytical era." Even Sibelius himself called his composition "a psychological symphony". His brother, the psychiatrist Christian Sibelius (1869--1922), was one of the first scholars to discuss psychoanalysis in Finland.

In the year before beginning the symphony, Sibelius had met many of his contemporaries in central Europe, including Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and others; his encounter with their music provoked a crisis in his own compositional life. He said in a letter to his friend (and biographer) Rosa Newmarch about the symphony: "It stands as a protest against present-day music. It has absolutely nothing of the circus about it." Later, when asked about the symphony, he quoted August Strindberg: "Det är synd om människorna" (One feels pity for human beings).

Travels in Karelia, especially Koli along with other experiences in the Finnish countryside definitely had a profound influence on his composing at this time in his life.

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