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.

– Gramophone

As a performer and conductor, Christian Lindberg has a rare ability to electrify an audience, and as reviewers attest, the same applies to his compositions. Released on disc in 2018, his viola concerto Steppenwolf was described as ‘one of those rare contemporary works that captures the attention from the first notes’ (Fanfare) while the five-star review in BBC Music Magazine spoke of ‘thrilling orchestral storytelling’ and ‘glorious musical cavalcades’. The present album offers further opportunity to acquaint oneself with the unstoppable energy of Lindberg in all of his three incarnations. The album is named after the closing work, 2017, described by Lindberg as his testimony about a year when the world changed, as a result of the US presidential election. Starting work on it on 1st January he followed the news in the media and let it feed his creative process throughout the course of the year. The opening work is an earlier one, commissioned for the nine trombones of The New Trombone Collective, and inspired by the spectacle of great waves rolling in at the beach in Wollongong, Australia. Framed by these two is Liverpool Lullabies, a concertante work for percussion and trombone which Lindberg composed with Evelyn Glennie and himself in mind. They are also the soloists on this recording, supported by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra which also shines in the other two works on the album.

Sebastian Manz writes: “It seems only logical at first glance to unite two Scandinavian composers, Carl Nielsen and Magnus Lindberg, on one [album], and it must be said that we are talking about two works that have permanently influenced and changed me as a musician. I played the Clarinet Concerto op. 57 by Carl Nielsen in 2008 for the finale of the ARD International Music Competition and won first prize. It was a huge challenge back then for me to have to play it by heart, as the rules required. Nerves, sleepless nights and superstitions about being able to learn something better by heart by having the score under one’s pillow at night all led on stage (with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra behind me) to one of my most intensive experiences ever. This piece of music is challenging both technically and musically, to the extent that after each performance I have the feeling of being not just a better clarinetist, but a more mature human being; it makes me realize that qualitatively high-value art requires time, not just to mature within ourselves, but to be recognized as such at all.”

At the age of 21, Leonard Bernstein wrote what he described as a ‘Hebrew song’ using a text from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Three years later the song became the final movement of his Symphony No. 1 and in January 1944 Bernstein himself conducted the première of the work. What is being lamented is the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, but according to the composer, he primarily wanted to convey the text’s ‘emotional quality’. The first movement thus aims to parallel in feeling the intensity of the prophet’s pleas while the scherzo gives a general sense of the destruction and chaos. Being a setting of the biblical text, the third movement is naturally more literary: the cry of Jeremiah, as he mourns his beloved Jerusalem. During the next few years, Bernstein’s career as a conductor took flight, while the musical On the Town made his name on Broadway. Towards the end of the 1940s he returned to the symphonic genre, however – once more with an extra-musical inspiration. W.H. Auden’s poem The Age of Anxiety is set during the recently concluded war, and falls – like the symphony – into six sections during which four characters express their anxieties, hopes and the quest for meaning and identity. Bernstein chose to portray all four characters via a single instrument, the piano, but he did not want to label the work a piano concerto. The instrument does however come to the fore at various points and in one of the final sections Bernstein supplies what is arguably the most exuberant and rhythmically dazzling display of piano writing in the symphonic literature. For this Christian Lindberg and the Arctic Philharmonic have enlisted the aid of Roland Pöntinen, while Anna Larsson is the soloist in Jeremiah.

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.

For the past twenty years, while maintaining an unsurpassed career as a trombone soloist and in tandem with being a sought-after conductor, Christian Lindberg has also been composing. Previous releases of his music have earned him critical praise: the reviewer in American Record Guide ‘was captivated by his interesting ideas and rich harmonic language’ while his counterpart on German website Klassik-Heute characterised Lindberg as ‘a marvellously deft, self-reliant composer’. The present album is the third BIS release dedicated entirely to Lindberg’s music, and features some of his more recent works. In his own liner notes, Lindberg describes his method of working, and explains the background of the three pieces recorded here with the Odense Symphony Orchestra. In regards to Steppenwolf, his viola concerto, he was attracted by the solo instrument’s ‘melancholic and deep qualities … offering an opportunity to compose something that could never be expressed in the same way with, for instance, a violin’. In a classical, three-movement concerto form, the work isn’t programmatic as such, but while composing it, Lindberg was reminded of the novel by Hermann Hesse. The title of the following piece, on the other hand, refers to a previous composition by Lindberg himself. Composed for a television project involving music as well as dance, the fifteen-minute Tales of Galamanta uses material from the ‘arte commedia’ Dawn from Galamanta.

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.

15 years ago lutenist Jakob Lindberg bought a very special instrument - one of the four extant lutes by Sixtus Rauwolf, built c.1560. The restoration of the lute took several years and was rather painstaking: for some repairs they een used ancient wood from the library in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence! Considering the great age of the instrument it was nevertheless in good shape and is now probably the only one in the world that, retaining its orignal soundboard, is in playable condition. This unique feature Lindberg has wanted to celebrate by recording music suitable for the instrument. Once upon a time, probably in 1715, this lute was equipped with a new neck allowing for a greater number of courses. This makes it perfect for the lute works of Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), famous among his contemporaries as the finest lutenist of his generation. (There is some reason to believe that Bach composed a couple of his works for solo lute after having met Weiss in 1739.) Weiss was also the most prolific of all lute composers: some 600 pieces have survived, whcih may amount to half of his entire production for the instrument. Most of the pieces on this disc are early works, grouped in suites - or Sonatas as Weiss himself termed them - by the composer himself or, in some cases, by Jakob Lindberg. Included are some of Weiss's best-known works, e.g. the 'Fantasie in C minor' as well as one of his rare fuguges for lute.