Andante Festivo, or ‘Festival Andante,’ is one of the last completed pieces of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and one of the few works he composed during the particularly extended and perplexing period of creative silence which ensued in the last 30 years of the composer’s long lifetime. Having attained to world-wide fame in the early twentieth century with his 7 symphonies, violin concerto and many other works, the composer fell into mysterious silence after 1926, until his death in 1957. He worked for a while on his Eighth Symphony but did not finish it, and destroyed the autographs because of his dissatisfaction with the work. Andante festivo is a very brief and peculiar exception to his enygmatic silence which lasted for three decades. Completed in 1938 and based on an earlier work performed at the wedding of his niece Riitta, this short composition was recorded phonographically under the baton of the composer in 1939 and broadcast as “Finland’s greeting to the world to celebrate the New York World Exhibition”. The character of tyhe work is hymn-like, which is not unusual for Sibelius, as he was the author of the Finlandia Hymn, one of the most significant national songs of Finland, and there are six more Christian hymns sung on his tune in Finland. It is not known whether the similarity between the melodic theme of Andante Festivo and the famous English-horn solo in the Largo from Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony From the New World is just an accident, or not.