Some time in the early 1980s I was asked to check the script of this film for factual accuracy, and often wondered what had become of it. In its present form this musical-video portrait of the Finnish master makes a strong impression. It is clearly divided into two halves; one devoted to the early years, lasting about 50 minutes, and a second, called ''Maturity and Silence'', which begins with the period of the Fourth Symphony and continues to the tantalizing years of apparent silence. I watched it with a gap of some days between the two, which is, I suspect, advisable. The abiding memory left from its Channel 4 transmission, alongside some interesting archival documentation, was of long stretches of forest landscape, interspersed with forests of bows of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra with Vladimir Ashkenazy in the distance. But memory is deceptive: true, we see a fair amount of the orchestra, albeit from a limited repertory of camera angles, playing very well indeed, but there are some striking visual images. The Fourth Symphony in particular offers landscapes of great beauty to which I would certainly want to return.
Christopher Nupen has achieved something unusual here, in that he successfully aims his documentary so as to engage the interest of both the well-informed and the less expert viewer, and does so in a way which is direct and unaffected. His commentary is intelligent, perceptive and well spoken, and he obviously has real feeling for his subject. (A very tiny point: the studio in which it was recorded was small, and he sounds a little boxy.) Overall the visual images are highly attractive, the sound is good, and the film is of value in offering us some archive footage of Sibelius walking near Ainola. (There is not as much film of Sibelius as there is of Richard Strauss or Stravinsky.) It is also worth noting that the ambitious film made by Finnish Radio and TV is not on the market so there is no alternative view to consider. But in any event Nupen's film will serve to bring many viewers a little closer to the composer, and that is no mean achievement.RL