Roland Pöntinen first entered a recording studio for BIS in 1983 – at the age of 20 – and released his début recital disc the following year. Since then he has appeared on more than 60 discs in the label’s catalogue, as soloist with orchestra, in piano recital and chamber music programs. Drawn from this impressive discography, Piano Rhapsody is a wide-ranging collection of pieces which allows us to admire the talent, the breadth of repertoire and the unquenchable curiosity of this ‘pianists’ pianist’.

But it is also an odyssey through the piano literature, which takes in the well-known
and less familiar (from Für Elise to Carl Tausig’s Johann Strauss paraphrase), and features
miniatures as well as bravura works (Satie’s Gnossiennes and Grieg’s Piano Concerto). It also
traverses a large tract of music history, making stops in the 1720s (Bach’s Prelude No.1 in C
major), the budding Romantic era (C.M. von Weber’s Perpetuum Mobile) and ’the Age of the Great Virtuosos’ (Liszt and Rubinstein, among others) and reflecting the proliferation of national schools in the early 20th century, with composers of Russian, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish and Czech extraction. All in all, the generous playing time (5 hours 20 minutes) and the wide-ranging program provide a unique opportunity to explore the piano and its literature, with one of Sweden’s finest pianists as our guide.

In terms of genre, Allan Pettersson was uniquely single-minded: during his entire career as a composer (1953–80) he produced only a dozen or so works that were not symphonies. By name, Violin Concerto No. 2 is one of these, but it is fair to say that it straddles the divide. Pettersson himself remarked: ‘In reality my work was a Symphony for violin and orchestra. From this results the fact that the solo violin is incorporated into the orchestra like any other instrument.’ It should therefore not come as a surprise that Christian Lindberg has chosen to include this massive 53-minute work in his acclaimed and award-winning series of Pettersson’s symphonies, realized in collaboration with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. The concerto was written in 1977, 28 years after its predecessor, the Concerto for Violin and String Quartet (1949). In that work, written while Pettersson was still studying, the composer was experimenting with radical ideas that are not to be found in his later compositions. Concerto No. 2 is rather characterized by the central role given to one of Pettersson’s Barefoot Songs – a trait that appears in several other mature works. Throughout the score, the song ‘The Lord walks in the meadow’ provides motivic material but is also quoted extensively. The hugely challenging solo part was first performed by Ida Haendel in 1980, and is here taken up by Ulf Wallin, who with an extensive discography has already proved himself to be one of the most intrepid violinists of today. The album closes with Pettersson’s last musical thoughts: a 207-bar long fragment generally regarded and referred to as a sketch for the composer’s Seventeenth Symphony. The fragment has been performed in public on one or two occasions, but it is only now that a wider public is given the opportunity to hear it.

Conceived as homage from the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir to the man who founded it in 1950 and remained its leader for 40 years, Knut Nystedt who passed away in December 2014, at the age of 99. Alongside the two Bach motets here featuring the choir along with Ensemble Allegria and Maria Angelika Carlsen on violin solo, among Nystedt’s repertoire with the choir, the collection also prominently features four works of Nystedt’s, including O Crux (1977) which Nystedt regarded as one of his main works. The choir provides an ineffable epitaph to Nystedt’s legacy with this release, together with Grete Pedersen, Nystedt's successor as artistic leader of the choir. Recorded in Super Audio.

On ‘Now & Then’, their latest disc, the Danish-Swedish Sirena Recorder Quartet offers up a wide-ranging selection from their regular concert repertoire, intending to illustrate the huge variety of sounds and moods achievable by just four recorder players – admittedly playing on more than twenty (!) different recorders between them, as well as on a toy piano appearing in the Swedish composer Staffan Mossenmark’s “Childhood.” The repertoire spans from a 14th-century estampie – a renaissance dance – to Chiel Meijering's Sanctus, composed in 2003, by way of Vivaldi and Bach.