Sibelius's First Symphony

The Cleveland Orchestra
David Robertson, conductor
Conrad Tao, piano
With the Kent Blossom Chamber Orchestra

Sibelius’s First Symphony opens with mystery — the breathy sound of a single clarinet gradually joined by the distant rumbling of timpani — giving way to gorgeous, romantic, searching melodies. Century Rolls, commissioned and recorded by The Cleveland Orchestra, was inspired by the old piano roll music of the 1920’s: “The concerto takes a kind of polymorphous-perverse pleasure in the whole past century of piano music, both popular and classical.”