Dan Andersson died at the age of 32 in 1920, more than 100 years ago. His poetry is still relevant and beloved. Many can still recite his poems and sing many of the compositions. He is one of Sweden's most important poets, a romantic working-class poet who gave voice to the poor in the country, depicted areas and conditions in Sweden that had hardly been illuminated before. One of the great strengths of his poetry is that it is universal, human and beautiful. Nature, love and the conditions of life play the biggest role.

Nils Ferlin is one of the Swedish poets whose poetry collections have been published in the largest editions. He is also one of the poets, whose poems most often have been set to music, despite they are often grave with dark motifs. He is one of the eternally living names of Swedish literature and the song treasure, a “people’s poet”.

Kerstin Margareta Meyer, CBE (3 April 1928 – 14 April 2020) was a Swedish mezzo-soprano who enjoyed an international career in opera and concert. She made her debut at 24 as Azucena in Il trovatore, 11 September 1952, at the Royal Stockholm Opera. A long-time member of the Royal Swedish Opera and Hamburg State Opera, she appeared regularly at the Royal Opera House in London and international opera houses and festivals. She died at the age of 92 in April 2020. The present release is a showcase of performances recorded between 1956 and 1980, during the peak of her career.

It was common practice in the nineteenth century for major orchestral and chamber works to be made available in piano four-hand reductions, as concert and recital-going was still a novelty and many middle-class homes had a piano, and these editions made such large works accessible to a much wider piano-playing public. What was less common was that Raff prepared his own piano four-hand arrangements, as often this time-consuming task was farmed out by composers and publishers to separate arrangers. However, Raff was also a skilled arranger himself. In addition to the original works mentioned above, he wrote a further eight works for piano four-hands which were either early pieces based on the melodies of other composers or more straightforward arrangements and transcriptions of the works of others, made at the request of publishers.

The Piano Four-Hands Sonata in E minor Op. 73b was arranged from the Violin Sonata No. 1, probably early in 1854 shortly after Raff finished work on the Sonata itself, but was not published by Schuberth until 1867, eight years after the original work, which had become the most successful of his five violin sonatas. The second work in the series, the Piano Four-Hands Sonata in A major Op. 90b, is an arrangement of the String Quartet No. 2, and was probably made immediately after Raff finished the Quartet in May 1857. The Quartet was published in 1862, but the Sonata remained in manuscript during Raff’s lifetime although it appears that as late as August 1881 Schuberth was preparing to publish it, as the company acknowledged receipt of Raff’s corrections of the proof. Publication never took place however, possibly because his death in June the next year intervened, and so it was not until the composer’s bicentenary year that Edition Nordstern published a first edition in 2022.

Siegfried is the third of the four music dramas that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen, by Richard Wagner. It premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 16 August 1876, as part of the first complete performance of The Ring cycle. Siegfried tells the coming-of-age story of the hero that Wagner has promised us at the end of Die Walküre. The most light-hearted of the four dramas, it contains genuine moments of humor. Siegfried, the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, has been raised by the dwarf Mime. However, impatient and inquisitive, he sets off on an adventure like no other. His journey through the opera traces his journey into adulthood, culminating in the meeting with our heroine, Brünnhilde, and the realization that he must cast off his reckless youth and become a man. The present release is a stage recording from the Royal Swedish Opera Stockholm made March, 1987.

It's the Viking era. The hero Angantyr has fallen. In his grave, he has taken with him the magical sword Tirfing, a sword that never misses to kill the enemy. His daughter Hervor needs the sword to protect herself from the cruel world of the Vikings. From his grave, Angantyr, who had no sons, demands that his daughter forever must appear as a man in order to retrieve and use the sword. Hervor dresses as the warrior Hervardur, receives the sword, which makes him/her an always unbeatable hero on the battlefields. However, the disguise will eventually prove to be her undoing. A love triangle develops between Hervardur and Vidar, "his" brother-in-arms who, in his way, is in love with Hervor/Hervardur, and Vidar's sister Gullv�g, who has fallen in love with the hero Hervardur, not knowing that he, in fact, is a woman. Gullv�g is courted by the three kings Gestur, Svasur, and Harald. Encouraged by her father, King Gudmundur, Gullv�g asks three riddles to be solved by the courting cavaliers. She will marry the one who can solve them all. But she is, in fact, in love with Hervardur, who succeeds in solving the riddles to Gullv�g's joy. However, Hervardur must (for obvious reasons) reject Gullv�g, which makes Vidar furious, meaning that this is an unforgivable insult to his family. He therefore challenges Hervardur to a duel, whereupon he is killed by the invincible sword Tirfing. Hervardur is proclaimed an outlaw by King Gudmundur. Brokenhearted, Hervardur tells Gullv�g of her true origin and once again seeks out her father's grave, returns the sword Tirfing, and dies.

The opera Waldermarsskatten is a fantasy around a real historical event on the island of Gotland on the east coast of Sweden, “The Valdemar Atterdag holding Visby to ransom, 1361”. The trade in the Baltic Sea was dominated by the German trading monopoly The Hanseatic League, which existed around 1150–1650. The city of Visby was included in this association. After a plague pandemic in the Nordic countries in the 1350s, the so-called ‘black death’, in which a third of the population died, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag wanted the rich merchants of the Hanseatic League to pay for a renewal of their trade privileges. Valdemar set off to Visby with about thirty ships to Gotland at the end of July 1361. Battles were fought, first on the coast-line then at Visby’s city wall, and in total around 1 800 Swedes are said to have lost their lives, while the Danes’ loss was around 300 souls. An unfair fight, one might think, as the Danish army consisted of German mercenaries, while Gotland was defended by civilian farmers.

After the critic’s failure with his first symphony in 1912, Hjellemo took his time before presenting his second work in this genre – symphony no. 2 in B minor, which was premiered in 1926. The 2nd Symphony is even more extensive and advanced than the 1st, and requires an even larger orchestra. This suggests well that Hjellemo had more confidence in his own abilities than in the critics’ judgment. The symphony is a large, epic work almost unparalleled in Norwegian music history. The symphony was, as critics reported, very well received by the audience – the composer had to come forward three times to receive applause. There are no sources mentioning anything about this concerto when it suddenly appeared on a concert program with the Philharmonic Company Orchestra in May 1934, where Hjellemo himself was conducting three of his works. The violin concerto received a good reception, and in the reviews, the soloist was particularly noticed. The entire program was also broadcast live on radio in several European countries. This piece has been performed on several occasions, also after the composer’s death. The premiere took place on 17 June 1936, and the soloist was Ernst Glaser. Hugo Kramm conducted the Radio Orchestra in Oslo, and also this time the concert was broadcast live in several European countries. At the premiere, the work had the title Rondo for violin and orchestra, but later Hjellemo changed it to Norsk Caprice. The piece consists of a short orchestral opening, introducing the soloist. What follows is a traditional Norwegian Halling (a folk dance in 2/4 or 6/8 meter typical for Norway), virtuoso written for the violin.

Christina Tobeck writes: “Although Helena Munktell, like other female composers, encountered opposition from male colleagues, she at long last received recognition also from those in power in the Swedish music life. In 1915, she was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and consequently she was the first woman to be elected solely on merits as a composer. And when the Swedish Society of Composers was formed in 1918, she was the only woman among the 38 founders. Today, Helena Munktell stands out as one of the foremost Swedish female composers, and an increasing number of people are discovering the richness in her works!”

The album Aurelio Barrios y Morales Anthology of his symphonic work portrays the fortunate revelation of a devoted Mexican musician who nearly fell into oblivion as time went by. His work is not played, and there are barely a handful of biography papers to show a glimpse on the life of this extraordinary composer, allowing us to appreciate his remarkable talent and his work as a pianist, organist, choir-master, and teacher. This Anthology is a set of four pieces which represent the most meaningful material regarding the brief orchestra work by Aurelio Barrios y Morales.