In the winter of 1901, Sibelius was wracked with grief following the death of his youngest daughter. The composer sought refuge with his family in the relative warmth and clemency of Rapallo, Italy. There, Sibelius tried to take his mind off real life by writing a piece of orchestral music telling the story of the great philanderer Don Juan.

But events couldn’t keep themselves out of Sibelius’s head, nor his music. What resulted was not a piece about Don Juan, but Sibelius’s great symphony of uprising in which a noodling three-note theme powers a musical journey culminating in an overwhelming climax.

When the symphony was first performed in Helsinki the following year, just about every Finn heard the music not so much as an expression of personal hope and renewal as a rallying cry against Russian occupation. Here, the symphony that has become Sibelius’s signature work is deconstructed and contextualized by a conductor who has long made it her own, our Chief Conductor Designate, Tabita Berglund.