The Cape Symphony Orchestra will perform “Nature’s Song: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons” April 11 and 12, 2026 at the Barnstable Performing Arts Center. While the Vivaldi grabs headlines, the shorter works to be performed in the concert’s first half are also not to be missed. First among them: Jean Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela.
“This is a gorgeous piece,” says Concertmaster Jae Cosmos Lee, who programmed the concert with a focus on music that describes nature, particularly birdsong. Sibelius, widely regarded as Finland’s greatest composer, was deeply inspired by Finnish culture and natural beauty. The Swan of Tuonela is a single-movement tone poem, one of a suite of four based on legends from Finland’s national epic poetry.
It is also “an amazing bucket list piece” for an English horn player, says Cape Symphony’s Laura Pardee Schaefer, who is thrilled to perform its famous, haunting solo. Her instrument—in fact neither English nor a horn, but a deeper-voiced cousin of the oboe—sounds the mythical swan, guiding departed souls across the river to the underworld.
“Many composers use oboe and English horn to represent poignancy or emotional pain… you can hear it in so many things, even film scores.” says Laura. For The Swan of Tuonela, “Sibelius needed that voice of stark loneliness that is also still so graceful, beautiful and warm… there’s a round warm sound, sort of in contrast to the cool tones of that misty inky river.”
Laura feels a special affinity for Sibelius’s work. “He was an incredible composer, very much in the Romantic style,” with music inspired by stories, scenes, or emotions. “His music has always spoken to me. He felt so dejected and isolated by the trends of the 1920s and ’30s that for the last 28 years of his life, he couldn’t bring himself to produce music for the public. I read that he even burned the score for his 8th symphony after working on it for a decade! More mathematical, pointillistic, cerebral music started coming to the fore, and Sibelius’s lush and evocative orchestral scores were just not in fashion.”
Like Sibelius, Laura is drawn to emotional expression in music. “Knowing this about him is something I can hang on to, and I can represent… The emotional part, the experience, is what I’m striving for. To evoke the commonality of human existence… it’s what alters the little pieces of our hearts and souls.
“That’s the magic, actually,” she says. “There are times when I’m feeling something about the music and it just comes through what I’m playing. That’s just otherworldly.”
Don’t miss this exceptional performance.
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Nature’s Song will be performed Saturday, April 11 at 4:00 PM and Sunday, April 12 at 3:00 PM. Purchase tickets at capesymphony.org or by calling 508.362.1111.
