I am a little obsessed with Finnish music, but I hadn't heard of Erkki Melartin before I saw a set of his symphonies at a bargain price on Amazon. I had to buy them them and find out more. Melartin was a few years younger than Sibelius and rather lived in the shadow of that great composer.
The first symphony seems a pleasant, competent, romantic work, written in 1902 but sounding as if it could have come from a few years earlier. It does sound a little Sibelian and it's fairly concise unlike some of the symphonic monsters around at the time. Melartin wasn't a great composer, but he deserves to be more widely known. And it's further evidence that, for its population size, Finland may be the greatest composing country since the 1890s.
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