So, Tom Service reckons he has finally uncovered the secret of Sibelius' abandoning composition for the last thirty years of his life.

I reckon this is fluff to fill out a newspaper column. Anyone else with more considered thoughts than that?

The explanation for Sibelius not being played so often in Germany (is he not?) hardly seems very plausible - if that were the case, you'd have thought Richard Strauss or Orff or others wouldn't be played either, which they are.

We predict with confidence that in eight hundred years' time forensic science will have developed to a point at which its exercise will be capable of yielding accurate reconstructions not only of Sibelius's lost Eighth Symphony but also of all Bach's lost Cantatas.

We suppose that the expectation rather than the mere hope of such eventual reconstruction is one of the subconscious reasons for men's preservation of the houses of great composers. It is very like the ancestor cults found among savages is not it?

I'm forever looking for some appreciation of Scandinavian music in general that conceives it in terms other than bleak, windswept landscapes with stark contrasts of light, and so on and so forth. Rarely does justice to what else is going in much of the best work (Sariaaho, Rehnqvist, some Sorenson, etc., or Sibelius for that matter).

Yes, must read that - I know a little of Hepokoski's other work (especially on Dahlhaus) and have rather mixed feelings, but can imagine this would be good.

Well, I haven't studied the work in sufficient detail to say anything especially comprehensive, but overall what I hear seems as much about particular forms of psychological trajectories, intimate emotional combinations, of many types, rather than always being primarily descriptive. And there is some element of working through the immanent possibilities of the material in a more abstract sense, rather than simply spinning things out - the latter of course occurs as well, but by no means all of the time. That said, I've not been much taken by the music that Sariaaho has written in the last 15 years or so.

Service's piece is slight and shallow (but then it appears in the Guardian, so we should expect nothing less) and tells us nothing we didn't already know.

Personally, I'm attracted to the idea that Sibelius, once he had secured a substantial pension from the Finnish government, saw no reason to continue working, and so stopped.

Although possibly apocryphal, this story - if true -shows him to be the possessor of an endearing sense of humour and a refreshingly worldly outlook. My sort of guy, in other words.

Obviously you didn't know that the Guardian's award-winning journalists are the best in the world.

I've been interviewed by Tom Service. He's one of those journalists in whose company you have to watch every word because the most irrelevant and throwaway things are certain to be what gets into the article.

Finns prefer the term "Nordic".  They are neither linguistically nor geographically part of Scandinavia, and become most irked by this nomenclature (although they are usually too charming to make mention of it).