Two of the UK’s major orchestras are conducted by Finns, and both men this week turned to their country’s national composer to mark the 100th anniversary of its independence

Finland won its independence 100 years ago this week. The new nation in the north of Europe was created by a pragmatic first world wartime agreement between two extremely different socialist governments: Finland’s democratically elected one (the first of its kind in the world) under Oskari Tokoi, and Russia’s new revolutionary regime under Lenin, which would change the world in more violent ways.

Classical music likes an anniversary, and Finland’s centenary was marked by two fine concerts on successive days in London, one in the Barbican Hall, the other in the Royal Festival Hall. Two of the most notable of Finland’s many great orchestral conductors presided over the occasions: Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the first, Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Philharmonia in the second.

It is not surprising, though it was a little disappointing, that the programmes were very similar. Both consisted entirely of Sibelius, with Oramo’s concert climaxing in an impassioned account of the first symphony and Salonen’s in an outstanding rendering of the Lemminkäinen Legends. Each programme featured a soloist, British cellist Guy Johnston with Oramo in the rarely played Two Serious Melodies, and the Norwegian Vilde Frang in a daringly fragile account of the much performed violin concerto under Salonen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). Photograph: Rex Features

Both programmes, with a certain inevitability, also began with Finlandia, which became, after it finally acquired the title by which we now know it, the musical embodiment of the new Finnish nation. Salonen’s performance was precise and brilliant, but it was Oramo who made the national warhorse really sing, giving Finlandia in its original context (where it is entitled Finland Awakes) – the finale of Sibelius’s unprepossessingly named seven-movement Music for the Press Celebrations (my journalistic heart beat faster nevertheless).

By long and common consent, Sibelius remains Finland’s national composer. That accolade should not be disrespected or dismissed. But it should be examined. Sibelius is, of course, a world figure, an exceptional artist, and he was a lifelong Finnish patriot. His art is rooted in Finland’s 19th-century national cultural revival, above all in the folk epic Kalevala, which was collected and first published in 1835 by Elias Lönnrot and which would be an unfailing source of inspiration for the composer from the early Kullervo symphony to his last orchestral masterpiece Tapiola. Sibelius was also a Finnish nationalist, both politically and, for him, in the more lastingly important sense that he embraced the movement for a Finnish national consciousness in the face of Russian rule and attempts to impose Russification.

Yet his status as the national composer of Finland is not unproblematic. The understandable deference that was attached to him and his achievement for so long had its oppressive side for Finnish music, as well as providing Finnish musicians with a passport to the wider world. It is worth remembering, for example, that the 20th-century image of Sibelius, much embodied in iconic late photographs and statues, as a granite, defiant patriotic northerner was to some extent and understandably a cold war image. An image shaped by Finland’s dangerous frontline position on the borders of the Soviet Union, and as a nation invaded by the Red Army in 1939-40, that lost parts of its territory back to Russia within a generation of independence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Perhaps even more importantly, as the 2009 biography by Glenda Dawn Goss makes clear, Sibelius studies have undergone a considerable and continuing period of revisionism – of which Salonen can be seen as an embodiment in the concert hall, and in which the cult of Sibelius has been deconstructed and re-examined by later generations of Finns and non-Finns in a less nationalistic and less heroic light.

This revisionism asks questions that do not subvert Sibelius’s eminence, but are less hidebound and reverential than in the 20th century. Sibelius was, after all, part of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority (as was his great early champion Robert Kajanus). He spoke Swedish as his first language, wrote his diaries in Swedish, gave his daughters Swedish names and, when interviewed by Finnish radio in 1948 at the age of 83, asked if he might speak in Swedish (the request was firmly quashed).

Sibelius was 52 when Finland became independent. He lived the majority of his life under Russian rule and was much influenced by Russian music, as the first symphony shows. Every note of the works that were performed in this week’s two concerts was written during this phase of his life. In what precise way should this music therefore be described as Finnish, or as the essence of Finnishness? Indeed, the famously long compositional silence of Sibelius’s late years (he wrote almost nothing after 1926 and died in 1957) falls entirely within the period of Finnish nationhood that began in 1917. Are the two connected? The question is unanswerable. Yet Sibelius’s Finland, one can surely argue in this of all weeks, is not quite the same thing as Finland’s Sibelius.

•The headline was amended on 9 December to better reflect the content of this essay, and on 14 December to change “ethnically Swedish minority” to “Swedish-speaking minority” and 1940 to 1939-40.