Work: Credo

Paavo Järvi and the Estonian Festival Orchestra don’t skirt all the pitfalls of a single-composer program in an all-Pärt evening at Carnegie Hall.

Flags, balloons and musical revelry bring the BBC Proms season to a close. 

Jean Sibelius is purported to have written part of his Symphony no. 5 after having witnessed a large flock of swans take flight from his home in rural Finland. Whether this story is apocryphal or not, the “swan theme” has become part of the Western musical subconscious, with quotations showing up in jazz and pop music for much of the last century.