This magical piece for piano by Claude Debussy should give you some good shivers as we approach the shortest day of the year and prepare for the deep winter season. Once you’ve read the title “The Snow is Dancing”, it’s nearly impossible not to hear the gentle flakes falling from the sky, layering on top of one another until your vision is obscured into a sea of white. If this makes you shiver, your heart will warm when you learn that the composer wrote this and other pieces in a set called Children’s Corner, which he dedicated to his infant daughter.

Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, in the icy air of night!
Keeping time, time, time, in a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Maybe Edgar Allan Poe was a little out of his mind, but you have to admit, The Bells is a pretty catchy poem. And maybe Franz Liszt was a little out of his mind, but you have to admit, his La Campanella is a pretty slick bit of piano-piano.

Despite his hair, Evgeny Kissin is not crazy. He makes this impossibly difficult piece look easy!

I don’t know much about Finland – mainly I just know they have weird spellllinnggs and llöts öf döts ïn thëïr wörrdds.

What I do know is that they love and revere their most famous composer, Jean Sibelius, so far as to making his birthday (today, December 8th) a national holiday, the “Day of Finnish Music”. And to top that, his face used to be on their currency (before they adopted the Euro). Not too shabby for a musician …

Sibelius would have been 150 years old today, if he hadn’t sadly died at the too-young age of 91. The natural thing would be to play his most famous work, Finlandia, but it’s Tuesday and I don’t want to get worked up this early in the week. Instead, here’s a delightfully melancholy work based on Finnish mythology, The Swan of Tuonela.