Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto Tina K Ramnarine

Abstract

Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor is today one of the most performed and recorded concertos composed for the instrument, and the work and its history have been much discussed in biographies and other Sibelius literature. In the recent years, the publications of the early version of the Concerto—an audio recording in 1991 and a critical edition in 2014—have led to about a special interest in the work. Typically, the views on different aspects of the composer Sibelius and his works presented by biographers and other writers have been echoed almost unchanged up to the present day. This also concerns the Violin Concerto, and against this background, Tina K. Ramnarine’s book, Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, published in the Oxford Keynotes Series, can be welcomed as an exciting exception. Ramnarine examines the Violin Concerto from a broad cultural and historical perspective, including today’s fashionable discussion about sociopolitical and transnational issues. As surprising as many of the views and conclusions in the book might be, they also are original and thought-provoking. The source material used for the book is wide and diverse, but justification for the focuses and emphases in the chapters and the use (or lack of use) of sources for some of the arguments raises questions. As a result of approaching the work ‘in a unique way’, as Kevin C. Karnes formulates as one of the tasks of the Oxford Keynotes in his Series Editor’s Introduction, the trains of thought in the book sometimes lead to areas that eventually may appear rather distant from the topic.