Music like Skogsrå

The Wood Nymph (in Swedish, Skogsrået; subtitled ballade pour l'orchestre), Op. 15, is a tone poem for orchestra written in 1894 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (Opus 15 also contains two other "Wood Nymphs," a piece for solo piano and a melodrama for narrator, piano, two horns, and strings; both resemble the tone poem thematically). Based on Swedish poet Viktor Rydberg's 1882 literary work of the same name, the piece premiered on April 17, 1895 in Helsinki, Finland with Sibelius himself conducting. Never published, The Wood Nymph gradually fell out of the repertoire, with the exception of a final performance in 1936. Six decades later, the manuscript was "rediscovered" among the University of Helsinki Library archives, with Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra giving the modern day "world premiere" on February 9, 1996. A typical performance lasts about 22 minutes, making The Wood Nymph the longest of Sibelius' single-movement symphonic poems.