Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

"My work demands all my energies, and the rehearsal of Sten’s quartet has gripped me completely. We worked like madmen out of joy in it; I perhaps with more pain than on any other occasion, for I understand the core of this piece so desperately well that I dream about it at night." - Tor Aulin

It was the violinist, string quartet leader, and composer Tor Aulin who raved with such empathy while preparing his friend Wilhelm Stenhammar’s fourth string quartet for performance. Stenhammar unfortunately even today continues to number among the group of those composers whom one might term the »great unknowns«; nearly all the works compromising his rather compact oeuvre are of pronouncedly high quality. Unlike Grieg, Nielsen, and Sibelius, Stenhammar never attained the status of a musical icon in his native country – for political and social reasons Sweden evidently had no need of such an influential personality. On its wonderfully harmonious and homogeneous new Surround recording of Stenhammar’s Quartets Nos. 3-6 the Oslo String Quartet impressively demonstrates that he merits much greater representation in today’s concert world than is currently the case.

STENHAMMAR 3 Fantasies for Piano . Late Summer Nights. Sonata, Op. 12 • Cassandra Wyss (pn) • CAPRICCIO C5117 (61:53)


Cassandra Wyss is a young pianist from Lichtenstein and, judging from the biography in the liner note to this CD, also a developing mezzo-soprano. And she is 19 years old! (Her website gives her repertoire as a singer and a pianist—and for Schubert’s Winterreise it indicates both!). I haven’t yet heard her sing, but if she sings as well as she plays the piano, she has an amazing future.


Wilhelm Stenhammar, probably familiar to many Fanfare readers, was a Swedish late Romantic composer (1871-1927) whose music does not deserve the neglect it has suffered from mainstream artists and record companies. His music has charm, grace, and elegance. It is marked by a very strong lyrical impulse and occasionally real power as well. Although he was influenced by Wagner and Bruckner (the scherzo of his G Minor Symphony has been aptly described as “Nordic Bruckner”), he balanced that influence with an essentially classical nature. Unlike some composers who never make it in from the fringes of the repertoire, Stenhammar possessed real inspiration—his music flows naturally and freely. The five-piece cycle Sensommarnätter ( Late Summer Nights ) deserves a place alongside piano works of Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, at the center of the repertoire.


There are competing recordings of all this material. Lucia Negro’s three-volume cycle of the complete Stenhammar piano music on BIS is recommended for those who want it all. Her playing is warm and colorful. But Wyss brings a more natural flexibility and a wider range of keyboard colors to the music. Wyss’s lilt in the last of the Late Summer Nights cycle is infectious, and she finds a depth of emotion in the op. 12 Sonata that others don’t quite reach. She achieves this through a very carefully thought out, but natural, sense of dynamic shading. Wyss manages dynamics with great imagination and an ability to find many different variants between piano and forte . She also applies some very subtle rubato in a way that keeps the music alive. Finally, and where she does separate herself from her competition, she plays with a smile. Charm is a critical element of this music, and Wyss conveys that winningly.


This disc introduces a major new artist to us, while at the same time serving one of Sweden’s most important composers very well. Capriccio’s notes are abysmally translated into what sometimes becomes pidgin English. It is nice that they provide notes, and they are helpful ones; but why not hire a native English speaker to do the final stage of translation? Sentences like: “However, the make of the sonata is less dense and more classicistic” really won’t do. Nonetheless, this is recommended with enthusiasm.


FANFARE: Henry Fogel

This disc offers a fascinating selection of both famous and little-known works by Wilhelm Stenhammar. The Serenade ranks among his finest works, and is considered a classic instance of the ‘white nights’ that characterize summer in Northern Europe. Of the remaining works, the ballads Florez and Blanzeflor and Ithaca are notable examples of his vocal writing, while the Interlude derives from his cantata The Song. Prélude and Bourrée is a hitherto unknown work here receiving its first recording.

This is a winner.

Listening to this instantly appealing and well-crafted music put a query in my head. I wondered how many times one of Sweden's greatest composers had been performed at the self-styled "The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival" - the BBC Proms. The answer - in over 100 hundred years might surprise - seven pieces. Dig a little further and you find that of the seven, three are of the same brief orchestral work; the interlude from the cantata The Song and three are of orchestral songs. Indeed three items were in a single concert. Which leaves a single performance of an important work - the Symphony No.2 on 12 September 1985. As part of "The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival" we have benefited from a concert by Michael Ball, two MGM Musicals extravaganzas and a homage to Stephen Sondheim to name but four recent 'happenings' but clearly Stenhammar simply does not measure up in the pantheon of the greats.
 
All of which is a slightly long-winded way of saying this is wonderfully attractive music of consummate skill that deserves to be far better known. Although there is recorded competition for this music - I have not heard the recent Hyperion disc - in their Romantic Piano Concerto series - at the Naxos price advantage and deploying the idiomatic and ever excellent Malmö Symphony Orchestra this is a winner. Soloist Niklas Sivelöv has a Stenhammar pedigree having recorded a solo recital disc of the composer also on Naxos (8.553730); not forgetting Martin Stürfalt’s solo recital on Hyperion. He proves to be an excellent and confident guide. Stenhammar was one of those extraordinarily gifted musicians initially famed as a pianist - his 1892 solo debut was playing the mighty Brahms Piano concerto No. 1 - then as a conductor - he was artistic director and principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra from 1906-1922. Only after that did be become known as a composer. His death from a stroke at the age of just 56 deprived the world of a major talent. As ever in such circumstances it is hard not to speculate what great works might have sprung from his pen if only he had lived another twenty years.
 
Naxos place the larger sprawling Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 1 second on the disc. Stenhammar had written earlier works but the addition of the Op.1 status shows the significance he felt the work had for him as a composer. The date proximity to his concert debut mentioned above makes the shade of Brahms that hangs over the work all the more understandable; particularly in his deployment of a 'symphonic' four-movement form. If one is being harsh - at over forty minutes it probably outstays its young composer's ability to handle his material over such a time-span. That being said, Sivelöv makes a very convincing and muscular case for the work. Certainly, by taking a good five minutes less time than Mats Widlund on Chandos (an epic 47:18) he minimises the discursive elements in the work. At the budget price point the main challenge comes from the Brilliant Classics re-release of BIS-sourced recordings. I have not heard the Brilliant/BIS first concerto but this current recording's 2nd Concerto is considerably finer than Cristina Ortiz's performance. Simply put Sivelöv has a more impressive technique. This is most clear in the quicksilver scherzo which is interpolated into the first movement proper. Here the kinship with Rachmaninov in general and the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini in particular stands out. Important to note though that the Stenhammar is the earlier work by some twenty-seven years. Sivelöv is absolutely superb here; all fleet gossamer passage-work and dextrous cross-rhythms. Ortiz plays the notes - just about - but it is far more laboured and as such counter to the spirit of the music. Undoubtedly this is one of Stenhammar's finest works - he still uses the four movement form but here it has been distilled down to a powerfully concise twenty-five minutes and is played in a single unbroken span. I would have thought that there is little debate that it is the finest Scandinavian piano concerto post-Grieg pre-Rautavaara and as such its neglect in the UK at least is a mystery - especially given its instant appeal. Conductor Mario Venzago is totally at home in this idiom and the Malmö orchestra sound very fine. It is not quite an open and shut case in favour of the new disc; the Brilliant set offers three discs thereby including the superb Symphony No.2 as well as the very Germanic - and subsequently disowned - Symphony No.1 and as such is excellent value. It should be noted that the important Symphony No.2 receives a good but not great performance in that Brilliant set. The Naxos disc is better recorded - the early BIS sonics just a little glassy and distant compared to the new disc but conversely the Gothenburg players - in the second concerto at least are just a little tighter than the current Malmö group. Stenhammar deploys thematic material that joins notes across beats almost obsessively and 'coming off the tie' with perfect unanimity gives the orchestra an occasional headache. Nothing in the recording information or indeed in terms of extraneous noise suggest live performances but that kind of technical performance glitch is more common in the concert hall than the recording studio.
 
Naxos have been slowly working their way through the bulk of Stenhammar's modest catalogue - in quantitative terms - although in a rather piece-meal fashion with each disc using a different combination of orchestras and soloists/conductors. I would suggest this new release would be a fine place to start an investigation of Stenhammar's music although the Symphony No.2 and the Serenade would need to be high up the list of requirements - the former in the classic Stig Westerberg/ Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra version. Certainly it remains both absurd and shameful that institutions like the Proms have yet fully to embrace the music of this most talented yet modest man
 
For all lovers of romantic piano concertos this disc will bring great pleasure.
 
-- Nick Barnard, MusicWeb International

"By chance, been enaged to a small pupil in Richard Andersson's music school in the autumn of 1891. Her name was Signe. Result: Gillet på Solhaug. In his autobiogrpahical sketch from the early 1920's, Wilhelm Stenhammar summarizes, in this way, the origin of the opera Gillet på Solhaug. He was twenty-one years old when he starts the work, but what experience did have have of larger music drama? Stenhammar embraced his inexperience and got to work. One can very well see Stenhammar's Gillet as one of many Nordic endeavors to link the Wagnerian music drama with the national romantic tradition.

Carl Stenhammar (1871-1927) trained as a pianist, and Brahms’s epic D minor Concerto held no fears for him. His writing for the instrument is accordingly bold and heroic from the outset, as his G minor Sonata from 1890 demonstrates. Held together by Wagnerian leitmotifs but often drawn into Schumannesque dreaming, the four-movement Sonata wears Austro-German passion on its sleeve, and Brahms continued to be a clear influence on Stenhammar’s piano writing in the three Fantasies Op.11 from 1895, but the harmonies are now clearer and more limpid, in the manner of Chopin but also singing with a more native Swedish or at least Nordic accent. Still more Franco-Russian in idiom are the Three Small Pieces from the same year, in the spirit of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces and Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, each distilling Stenhammar’s individual melodic style within a minute or two. The high point of his solo piano output – as distinct from the mighty Second Piano Concerto which has found a place on the fringes of the Romantic repertoire – is reached with the Late Summer Nights Op.33, a five-movement cycle of concise tone-pictures which ventures into speculative harmonic realms like Fauré’s late Nocturnes, demanding the most refined of responses from the pianist. The Italian pianist Paolo Scafarella is fast becoming a Stenhammar specialist. He has been engaged to record the concertos with the Orchestra Filarmonica Campana in Pagani, near Naples, and he performs in the major halls of his native country. This release marks his debut on Piano Classics.