E-Mail This Article to a Friend The idea of north Sibelius’s ‘pure cold water’ at the BSO BY DAVID WEININGER

Many critics have commented on how much the music of Jean Sibelius resembles the composer’s native land. Its imposing stance and austere strength are the perfect analogue to Finland’s beautifully unforgiving landscape. "When we see these granite rocks," Sibelius once told a fellow Finnish composer, "we know why we are able to treat the orchestra the way we do." More than his fellow Scandinavians Carl Nielsen or Edvard Grieg, he reflects in his music the rugged sense of isolation and unvarnished natural beauty that Glenn Gould once dubbed "the idea of north."

Yet that inevitable-seeming association between artist and homeland may have done Sibelius’s long-term reputation more harm than good. It wasn’t so long ago that he was one of those composers routinely lumped into the category of "nationalists." Here he mingled, for no particularly good reason, with Czechs, Hungarians, Russians, and anyone else who fell outside the Western European orbit that constituted the real arena of art music. No matter how sophisticated their adaptations of prevalent musical forms and techniques, all these composers were notable (supposedly) for the way they infused their music with pre-modern melodies and styles. It was less important that a nationalist wrote great symphonies or quartets than that in doing so he communicated something important about his "folk."

It’s true that many of Sibelius’s earliest mature works — think of the patriotic potboiler Finlandia, or the choral symphony Kullervo — were steeped in Finnish tradition and mythology. Even so, in his case, the nationalist emphasis is especially misplaced. His legacy rests principally on his seven instrumental symphonies, and his contribution was to lead symphonic music away from the intensely subjective, ardently romantic, wildly colorful character it had assumed under Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler and toward a more abstract ideal. The difference was crystallized succinctly when Mahler visited Sibelius in Helsinki in 1907, a meeting that brought forth Mahler’s famous statement that a symphony "must be like the world. It must be all-embracing." The remark that elicited this passionate rejoinder was Sibelius’s praise for the symphony’s "severity of form" and "profound inner logic."

The disparity between these two world views is brought into sharp relief by a glance at the work each composer completed that year. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is music on the grandest possible scale, a magnificently unwieldy hymn to love and salvation. Sibelius’s Third is his trimmest, most reserved symphony, and his clearest nod to the classical tradition, whose defender he had now become. That he was no throwback to the 19th century became clear from the stark dissonances of the Fourth Symphony, and that he could write brilliantly in the heroic vein was evident from the Fifth. But neither exuberance nor experimentation would ever allow him to exceed the formal constraints he willingly embraced.

In contrast to the strange concoctions other composers were mixing, Sibelius described his Sixth Symphony as "pure cold water." It could plausibly be labeled his "Pastoral" — delicately scored with some beautiful tone painting of bird calls, and largely bereft of the titanic majesty of its predecessor. Only in the finale is there any hint of sturm und drang, and even that dissipates quickly in the coda. One would be hard pressed to imagine from the music the intense personal and political turmoil the composer endured during its gestation.

Even more radical is the Seventh, a single-movement masterpiece from 1924 that brilliantly fulfills his goals of organicism and "inner logic." Its original title was "Symphonic Fantasy," and for good reason: for all its careful organization, it flows so smoothly that few would guess at the "severity of form" that underlies its iridescent sounds. It was Sibelius’s penultimate orchestral work (the tone poem Tapiola would be his last), and it’s difficult to think of another work that so amazingly balances lyricism with abstract musical logic.

Those last two symphonies are on display next week at the Boston Symphony Orchestra as one of Sibelius’s most distinguished interpreters — fellow Finn Paavo Berglund, who’s recorded all seven symphonies three times over — makes his debut with the orchestra. Joining them are Britten’s arrangement of the second movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony ("What the Wild Flowers Tell Me") and the Britten Violin Concerto, with Frank Peter Zimmermann. Concerts are March 25, 27, and 30 at 8 p.m. and March 26 at 1:30 p.m., all at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston. Tickets are $26 to $95; call (617) 266-1200.