Berg: Symphony No. 3; Reverenza; Hertiginnans Friare Suite / Rasilainen,Norrkoping
CPO
CD
$18.99Mar 30, 2010
Natanael Berg (1879 - 1957) studied at the Stockholm Conservatory and was a Swedish Army veterinarian who, as a freelance musician also composed music in a Late Romantic style. Natanael Berg's colorful music is the subject of an on-going project on the CPO label.
Hans Eklund numbers among the Swedish composers who gained public notice in the 1950s following his studies at the Royal Music Academy from 1947 to 1952 with Lars-Erik Larsson, one of his country’s most popular composers. Although Eklund was one of the very first Swedish composers whose music was performed at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, his music never abandoned tonality. Eklund wrote a total of thirteen symphonies. With the exception of the fourth, all of these works have richly associative Italian titles. His third symphony was inspired by the landscape and folk music of the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, while in his fifth symphony he deals with the subversive powers of war. The music sounds grey, sharper, not so smooth rhythmically, and hotter. Although Eklund termed his eleventh symphony of 1995 the “Sinfonia piccola,” it is ironically one of his longest such works as well as a memorial tribute to his honored teacher Lars-Erik Larsson. The time to rediscover this important symphonist is now!
Included on a separate DVD: 'Människans röst' ('Vox humana'), an 81-minute documentary (1973-78) about the composer made for Sveriges Television by Peter Berggren, Tommy Höglind and Gunnar Källström. With subtitles in English Allan Pettersson composed his Ninth Symphony in 1970, two years after the Seventh had been given a triumphant première conducted by Antal Dorati. This had brought him greater recognition than ever before, but at the same time his health was deteriorating even further, and shortly after completing the Ninth Pettersson was hospitalized for a period of nine months. It is striking that he at such a time should have chosen to compose what is the longest of all his works - in the score Pettersson himself estimated the duration to '65-70 minutes', and the first recording of the work actually lasted for more than 80 minutes. As so many of the symphonies, the work is in one single movement which may be described as an extended struggle in which harmony is the ultimate winner. As Pettersson himself had said about an earlier work: 'If one fights one's way through a symphony one needs to achieve consonance and harmony even if it takes twenty hours to do so.' In the case of the Ninth, this harmony is summed up more concisely than ever before or after, in the final two chords which form a plagal or 'Amen' cadence in F major. Completing a cycle for BIS of Pettersson's symphonies, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have been receiving great critical acclaim for previous instalments - most recently a Sixth described in International Record Review as 'a release that could well be the ideal introduction to Pettersson's singular musical vision'. About the same disc, the reviewer in Gramophone wrote: 'Lindberg's empathy for Pettersson's music is once again shown in the Sixth, where he catches its dark atmosphere to perfection, pacing its progress through the succession of climaxes superbly well.' The present recording is accompanied by a bonus DVD - an 80-minute documentary made during Allan Pettersson's final years which for the first time is being made available to a wider international audience.
Beginning his first (never completed) symphony in 1951 and working on his 17th when he died in 1980, Allan Pettersson during three decades concerned himself almost exclusively with the symphonic genre – and this at a time when many composers considered the symphony (and indeed the symphony orchestra) to be hopelessly old-fashioned. Pettersson, however, was deeply committed to the genre, something which in Sweden during the early 1960s was so unusual that he was called ‘the last symphonist’. He completed his Symphony No.13 in August 1976, as a commission by the Bergen Festival for its 25th anniversary the following year. The complexity and large scale of the work was such that the first performance was postponed for another year, however – and in fact the work had never been performed in Sweden until Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra played it in concert in 2014. As the majority of Pettersson’s symphonies it is in one movement, harbouring the great contrasts between an atonal and a traditional, tonal idiom that characterize the composer’s musical language. A noteworthy feature in the present work is the presence of many brief allusions to other composers – from Beethoven (with the theme to the Fifth Symphony) to D-S-C-H, the musical cryptogram of Shostakovich’s name. Over the course of four previous discs, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have demonstrated a true affinity with Pettersson’s music, an affinity that deepens with each new recording.
Review:
The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra articulate the music's 'soaring melodies and grippingly searing polyphony' [convincingly] and Lindberg shapes the structure compellingly. Lindberg seems to feel keenly the work's intense range of mood - the ferocity and depth of its emotion, the consolation that this engenders - and communicates this to his orchestra in masterly fashion.
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
BEETHOVEN Piano Concertos: in E?, WoO 4 (reconst. Brautigam); No. 2 in B?. Rondo in B? • Ronald Brautigam (pn); Andrew Parrott (cond); Norrköping SO • BIS 1792 (58:04)
Few piano recording buffs will have missed the remarkable career trajectory of Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam. Particularly since his association with the Swedish label BIS began in 1995, the releases don’t seem to quit. Now in his mid-fifties, it’s natural that Brautigam should be at the peak of his powers. His recorded repertoire, if not catholic, demonstrates a healthy musical curiosity. Canonic figures are amply represented alongside those less frequently encountered: Haydn and Mozart with Joseph Martin Kraus; Mendelssohn with Gade; Shostakovich and Hindemith with Duruflé, Martin, and Hahn. But it’s not Brautigam’s enviable technical polish that sets him apart from many of his colleagues, nor his lofty musical grasp. It is his individuality. He has a searching musical intelligence, a disarming self-effacement before the score, and an astonishing conscientiousness that, in combination, make him sound like no one else. Witness, for instance, his complete Haydn set, some 15 discs (BIS 1731) representing essentially all the master’s solo keyboard works currently known, recorded over five years, beginning in 1998. Here the same care and imagination are lavished on the earliest experimental sonatas from the lean, free-lance years that are accorded the mature works representing the summit of Haydn’s achievement. Finally, Brautigam has the uncanny ability to turn in consummate performances, equally compelling in stylistic terms, whether he plays replicas of historical instruments or the modern concert grand. In this aspect he seems an entirely new type of pianist. His on-going Beethoven project with BIS, demonstrates this parallel track aptitude with stunning artistic results: the sonatas are being recorded on period-appropriate fortepiano replicas, while the concertos are played on the modern piano, fully informed by cutting-edge performance practice.
Following the release of the First and Third Concertos (BIS 1692) last year, Brautigam and Parrot turn their attention to the earliest known works of Beethoven for piano and orchestra. Only a manuscript of the piano solo part of the E? Concerto survives, dating from around 1784. Fortunately for posterity, Beethoven incorporated the orchestral tutti into the piano part, along with some subsequent editorial changes. Thus a speculative reconstruction of the lost orchestral score is possible, based on the composer’s unusual instrumentation (calling for strings with two flutes and two horns, but no oboes or bassoons). The reconstruction recorded here is Brautigam’s own, as are the candenzas for both WoO 4 and the Rondo. (Beethoven’s 1809 cadenzas are used in the Concerto No. 2.)
Given its sparse representation in the catalogs, the E? Concerto is of special interest. Little in this charming piece suggests that it is the creation of a 13-year-old. Brautigam brings an air of naive exuberance to the difficult solo part; the delicate fiorituras of the Larghetto are breathtakingly poetic. Here, in Brautigam’s superbly reconstructed orchestral score, as indeed throughout the recording, Parrott and the Norrköping musicians are responsive partners of remarkable sensitivity. Moreover, in the Rondo of No. 2, the give-and-take between soloist and orchestra is nothing short of sublime, imbued with an exhilaration that’s utterly infectious. It follows an Adagio of ethereal tenderness. Without doubt, this is the most dynamic, shapely, and vivid recording of the Beethoven Second one is ever likely to hear. It’s worth mentioning that the Steinway D used here, with lid removed, was placed in the middle of the orchestra, continuo style, which does a lot to explain both the cohesive ensemble and the beautifully blended sound of the recording.
Comparisons? This canonic repertoire boasts more than a few canonic interpretations—Schnabel’s revelatory musicality, Rubinstein’s aristocratic poise, Serkin’s modest edginess, and the lofty humanism of Backhaus come immediately to mind. Let me put it this way, without any denigration of artists whom I respect and admire immensely: listening to two recent wonderful Beethoven cycles, those of Plentnev with Gansch and the Russian National O (DG) and Goode with Fischer and the Budapest Festival O (Nonesuch), I hear the glorious recent past, ripe, insightful, often brilliant, immensely pleasurable; listening to Ronald Brautigam, Andrew Parrott, and the Norrköping SO, I hear the future.
FANFARE: Patrick Rucker
Ronald Brautigam is an excellent Beethoven pianist, and he turns in a performance of the Second concerto's solo part that's as lively and attractive as anyone has yet recorded on a modern instrument. It's especially nice to hear the finale taken at a tempo that permits all of the main theme's rhythmic bounce to register without it ever sounding breathless or frantic. The same holds true of the Rondo in B-flat, the Second concerto's original finale. Indeed, the only caveat in these performances concerns the slow movements, where Andrew Parrott, evidently with the acquiescence of his soloist, encourages the orchestra to indulge in that dry, vibrato-less string tone that is the very opposite of stylishness (and utterly contrary to what their own sources say about sustained lyrical music in slow tempos).
The E-flat concerto is an early work in Mozartian style, here very nicely reconstructed by Brautigam from the existing piano score. Indications of scoring in the keyboard part point to an orchestra of strings, two flutes, and two horns, a very unusual combination, and I'm not convinced that two oboes ought not to have been added as a matter of course. Still, there's no denying the distinctive tone color that the absence of double reeds gives the work's overall sonority, and it would be hard to imagine a more sympathetic performance than this one (never mind Parrott and his scratchy strings). I look forward to further releases in this (so far) very rewarding edition.
Pettersson: Symphony No. 12, 'The Dead in the Square' / Lindberg, Norrkoping Symphony
BIS
SACD
$21.99Jan 08, 2021
The Twelfth Symphony forms an exception in Allan Pettersson’s output. When he agreed to compose a work for the 500th anniversary of Uppsala University, it was one of the few commissions that he ever accepted. Having written purely orchestral scores for the past 30 years, he decided to incorporate a choir and a text. Pablo Neruda had received the Nobel Prize in 1971, and acknowledging the poet’s ‘deeply felt compassion for the outcasts of society’, Pettersson selected nine poems from the huge collection Canto general for his new work. As Pettersson was composing the symphony, Neruda died during the tumultuous aftermath of the military coup in Chile on 11 September 1973. The poems deal with an incident in Santiago de Chile in 1946 when six demonstrators were killed by the police during a workers’ manifestation. Pettersson, who came from a working-class background, commented on the subject matter: ‘My heart was, and is, with the poor of Chile, so like the worker in the ‘third world’ in which I grew up.’ Typically Pettersson, the symphony is in one movement. The choral parts are highly demanding – the choir sings almost without interruption, and often very forcefully and in difficult registers. The Swedish Radio Choir and Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, two of Sweden’s finest choirs, have combined their forces for this recording and join the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and Christian Lindberg on the latest installment in the team’s acclaimed Pettersson cycle.
REVIEW:
The Swedish Radio and Eric Ericson Chamber Choirs are no strangers to Pettersson’s idiom, having figured in earlier recordings. Lindberg’s is now the third Twelfth to appear, the best-recorded of them and, I think, the best-sung, magnificently supported by the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. A fabulous account of a remarkable work.
Born in 2000, Swedish violinist Johan Dalene is already making an impact on the international scene. His refreshingly honest musicality, combined with an ability to engage with musicians and audiences alike, has won him many admirers. Johan began playing the violin at the age of four and made his professional concerto debut three years later. A student at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, he has also worked closely with mentors including Janine Jansen, Leif Ove Andsnes and Gidon Kremer. Johan has been a prize winner at a number of competitions, most recently the prestigious Carl Nielsen Competition at which he won First Prize. During the finals of the Nielsen competition Johan performed Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, a work which he had already recorded for BIS two months earlier, in January 2019. On this debut recording, Johan plays with his ‘local band’: Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, known from many acclaimed recordings on BIS. The album closes with Samuel Barber’s lyrical and contemplative Violin Concerto from 1939.
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REVIEWS:
From the shaping of his solo entrance in the Tchaikovsky alone there’s a ‘presence’ about Johan Dalene’s playing that announces a musician of special sensibilities. The most striking thing about this young Swedish player is the complete absence of showiness or indeed any sense of virtuosity on display. The Barber really suits Dalene. it is testament to a maturity way beyond his years that he comes close to breaking your heart with it.
– Gramophone
Three things strike this listener about violinist Johan Dalene. First of all, he produces a beautiful, rich, sound – the instrument really sings. Second, and no surprise, the technical demands of these two works hold no fear for him. Third, his playing, though full of individual character, is refreshingly direct and simple, as if his primary aim is to fulfil the wishes of the composer.
Tchaikovsky frequently repeats tiny melodic fragments in this movement, to the point that a previous generation of violinists thought they knew better and settled on a number of tiny cuts. I’m pleased to say that this disfiguring trend is now disappearing and that Dalene plays everything as written. The close of the concerto is as exciting as you will hear anywhere.
Selected by ECHO (the European Concert Hall Organisation) as one of its ‘Rising Stars’ of the 2009/10 season, the Swedish clarinettist Emil Jonason has become increasingly visible on the international music scene. For his first release on the BIS label he has chosen to record a concerto written for him by his compatriot Christian Lindberg, composer, conductor and legendary trombonist. As Lindberg remarks in his own note on the work, the soloist was involved at all stages of the compositional process. But the Erratic Dreams are the composer’s own – as is the figure of Mr Grönstedt, the main character of those dreams, and of the six movements that make up the colourful score. In his teens, Emil Jonason was attracted by klezmer music, and played in various klezmer bands. It was therefore a natural choice to combine Lindberg’s concerto with the Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s work The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. In contrast to Lindberg, Golijov found inspiration in a historic figure, the medieval rabbi Isaac the Blind, and his lifelong dedication to the ideas of the Kabbalah. Golijov describes the movements of his work being written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout its history: Aramaic, Yiddish (‘the rich and fragile language of a long exile’) and Hebrew. The work includes references to Jewish prayers as well as to klezmer tunes and the clarinettist is specifically requested by the composer to acquaint himself with the idiom of klezmer music.
Christian Sinding might be thought of as a Grade-B composer. That’s not a dismissal, merely an assessment to adjust the expectations. He’s not the symphonic Grieg we’ve been missing, nor a Nordic Brahms that’s been overlooked. He’s an – essentially German – symphonist of the second rank who wrote very pleasing works that we will sadly not hear in the concert halls, but which can enliven our musical diet on record if we need to take a break from the usual suspects. To unfold their inherent fervour, his compositions are dependent on sensitive and enthusiastic interpretations, but that’s exactly what they get from the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Karl Heinz Steffens, for whom Sinding has become a composer close to his heart.
Swedes are proud of Elfrida Andree. She was the first woman that conquered the position of cathedral organist. Even reactionaries that were appalled at having a woman playing from the gallery capitulated at hearing her skill. Critics that reviewed her compositions found positive words for her - even for her first symphony, premiered in 1869, which the composer later disparaged as an "early work". The Fritiof Suite, on the other hand, was an unqualified success. In 1909, Elfrida Andree made a suite of five movements based on her (only) opera Fritiof Saga. Unlike the staged work of 1898, these 'scenes' were once very popular - a fantastic piece of incidental music for the Fritiof epic by the poet Esaias Tegner, which practically every child in Sweden knew.
Finland has it's Sibelius, Denmark it's Nielsen-but who was the most important composer in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century, a figure who entered music history with a voice entirely his own? Ture Rangström (1884-1947). He was a natural talent, a musical force of nature. And so is his music: monumental, hymn-like, and elemental. With a keen sense for new ideas, he created al fresco musical tableaux in a block-like technique, in which elegiac passages are at times colored by glaring orchestral effects. This music is overwhelming in the truest sense of the word.
In their series of Allan Pettersson’s symphonies, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have arrived at the Fourteenth Symphony, completed in 1978 and given its first performance in 1981, one year after the death of the composer.
As several of its predecessors, No. 14 is in one extended movement and is scored for large forces, including an expanded percussion section. But there are also important traits that set it apart.
Pettersson, who had studied twelve-tone composition with René Leibovitz in the early 1950’s, never adopted the technique fully but in the present work the traces are more evident than in his other symphonies.
Included with the new recording is a bonus film produced by Swedish Television after the death of the composer. In the course of the film, here provided with English subtitles, we meet the composer himself, members of his family, colleagues from his time as an orchestral player and musicians such as the violinist Ida Haendel.
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REVIEW:
Granted, this is not always the easiest music to listen to, but as with Pettersson's other symphonies there’s a clear connective thread beneath the tumult that’s easy enough to follow. As for the more austere writing – the start of the fourth movement, for instance – it has a well-defined shape that’s thrown into sharp relief by the forensic, soul-baring sound. The military drum – sans snare – adds terrific bite to the martial interludes; then, without warning, Pettersson lapses into a strange kind of languor, in which pensive pizzicati alternate with a slow, tolling motif. And in the fifth movement the music’s tendency to rasp and grind is leavened by the absorbing, ‘hear-through’ nature of the recording.
Happily, the symphony’s climactic moments – dense and forbidding as they often are – they arrive in a way that’s not at all rhetorical. Again, there’s an evolutionary and organic aspect to Pettersson’s writing that binds everything together in a most convincing fashion. The sheer focus and commitment of these players – not to mention Lindberg’s sure, steadying hand – certainly make for an eventful and challenging ride. There are no easy answers here, no platitudes or false cheer; that said, the finale brings with it a modicum of rest or, perhaps, an air of quiet stoicism.
Hugo Alfvén’s music has always been close to the hearts of the Swedish people, and ranks among some of the most significant and representative of the spirit of the country. Alfvén is known as a cheerful entertainer in compositions such as Den forlorade sonen (‘The Prodigal Son’), but his symphonies reveal a different, more elegiac and often more dramatic side. The success of Alfvén’s symphonies fundamentally changed Sweden’s musical climate and, with a substantial collection of further orchestral music representing his gloriously rich and varied style, these recordings sweep us into the remarkable world of Scandinavian landscape and culture.
Past praise for previously released volumes included in this set:
The Norrköping Symphony plays with confidence and fervor. Alfvén was nothing if not expansive, and if his formal touch was never all that deft, he did know how to fill up time with arresting ideas, glowingly scored. A serenely lovely Andante religioso makes a perfect encore, one that puts the finale of the symphony’s straining for heroic effect in its proper perspective in the gentlest and most affecting way. Naxos’ sonics for this production are also excellent. Very enjoyable indeed.
-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)
The Prodigal Son, Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 11 / Willén, Ireland NSO
Listen as Niklas Willén teases the skittish polka from “The Prodigal Son” ballet suite, or steers his players through the vehement fugue that rounds out his Symphony No. 2, and you’ll appreciate why this release commands unreserved praise. These works come to life in Willén’s hands.
Willén’s reading of the Symphony's Andante conjures a huge range of textures and sonorities, with the dark-hued horns and sombre lower winds particularly impressive. The players give all they have in music that’s probably new to them, and that extra effort is just one of the factors that makes these performances so compelling.
If you haven’t heard these charming, folk-music-inspired gems of late Romantic music, then here’s an excellent place to start. The Symphony also sounds consistently fresh and lively, though it’s hard to shake the impression that the composer was happier writing programmatic works in free form than in indulging the more intellectual rigors of symphonic development. In Willén’s sympathetic hands, however, none of its four movements outstays its welcome. In any event, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra plays with confidence and evident enjoyment, and the recorded sound is very good.
