by Ben Hogwood

With the UK braced for the arrival of Storm Éowyn today, it got me thinking of successful portrayals of storms in music.

The first piece that came to mind was Sibelius’s masterpiece Tapiola, a remarkable and vivid orchestral poem written late in his compositional career about Tapio, the spirit of the forest. Its depiction of a storm is like no other.

Listen here, in a particularly incendiary account from the Berliner Philharmoniker and Herbert von Karajan, keeping an ear out for the storm as it begins around the 16:50 mark:

Published post no.2,421 – Friday 24 January 2025