Akutagawa: Ellora Symphony, Etc / Yuasa, New Zealand So
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$19.99May 17, 2005
As a result of his varied activities inside and outside the concert hall, as composer, conductor of professional and amateur ensembles, lecturer on television and radio, author of books on music, and a visible supporter of the anti-nuclear movement, Yasushi Akutagawa (1925–89) might be considered the Japanese equivalent of Leonard Bernstein. Thanks to Morihide Katayama’s thorough program notes, we learn that Akutagawa’s compositional career can be divided into three periods: early, in which he attempted to integrate the rhythmic impulses learned from his main teacher, Akira Ifukube, with a lyrical strain identified with another teacher, Qunihico Hashimoto (who himself had studied with Egon Wellesz in Vienna), while also absorbing musical influences from Russian composers like Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and Shostakovich (he conducted the Japanese premiere of the latter’s Fourth Symphony); middle, exploring avant-garde tendencies as Akutagawa aligned himself with fellow composers Toru Takemitsu and Toshiro Mayuzumi; and late, attempting a populist combination of elements from the first two. Helpfully, on this disc we are given one work illustrating each of these respective periods.
Listening to these attractive works, however, one can hear commonalities that run consistently through Akutagawa’s music—a rhythmic vitality, colorful orchestration, and ability to paint a mood, all of which may be attributed to Akutagawa’s childhood love of Stravinsky’s early ballets. Occasional echoes of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring emerge and quickly recede—so quickly, in fact, that they sound less like an influence and more like a brief, subconscious, unattributable memory. Much more substantial, primarily in the earliest of these compositions, the Trinita Sinfonica (1948), is the post-Stravinsky Russian influence. There is a playful tone and flair unheard in the later works, especially in the jubilant roller-coaster finale, and a hint of dark undercurrent to the otherwise romantic flow of lullabies in the slow second movement.
Even though the Ellora Symphony (1958), a product of Akutagawa’s exploratory period, was originally designed to allow an aleatoric re-ordering of its 20 (now reduced to 15) concise movements from performance to performance, the alternately tranquil passages and turbulent outbursts (heavy on percussion) contain a motivic and symbolic unity that keep their dramatic logic intact. Built from Akutagawa’s primary compositional method of manipulating small units, each movement’s close-knit intervallic motifs represent masculine and feminine characteristics. Katayama states that the symphony is “a hymn to primitive reproduction,” but the fantasy and power of the music—especially those Stravinskyan ostinatos—suggest sources and a setting more mythic than merely primitive.
From the period of his greatest popularity, the Rapsodia (1971) fluidly mixes these propulsive rhythms, via small energetic units and ostinato figures, with long-lined counterpoint and tone painting. Despite his occasional use of indigenous dance melodies and pentatonic scales, if these three works are typical, Akutagawa’s compositions contain less specific Japanese musical references than many of his contemporaries. But his fluency in the mid-century modernist vocabulary—especially in the hands of an experienced conductor like Yuasa—makes his music worthy of attention.
Written between 1905 and 1908, the Suite Iberia was and is without any doubt Albeniz's masterpiece. Iberia is an ambitious and remarkably sophisticated composition with a formidable architectural structure of uniquely impressive dimensions. All the pieces are based on traditional Spanish dance rhythms, arranged in a freely artistic and idealized manner. The rhythmical dances smoothly alternate with the \vocal" part, the copla. In traditional Spanish music the copla is a characteristic part of the structure seen in many forms like the saeta (arrow), or a cante jondo (deep song), the song of deep feelings. Albeniz has included a copla in almost all of the pieces in Iberia.
Albéniz’s distinctive musical vocabulary, with its sensual harmonies, rich melodic lines and characteristic rhythmic figures, has ensured lasting popularity, not least in his music for the piano. This album of four-hand piano music reveals the composer’s love of Spain’s regional music traditions, whether in the glittering sweep of the Suite española No. 1or in the Rapsodia Española where a hypnotic dreamscape meets dramatic outbursts. Two movements from Iberia – one of which is a rarely encountered arrangement by the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha – reveal a daring modernity that aligns Albéniz with Debussy and Ravel.
Albeniz: Piano Music - Espana; Deseo; Zortzico; Yvonne En Visite!
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Nov 11, 2014
Volume 6 of this complete edition focuses in the main on Albéniz’s richly varied, early salon style. + It includes the dazzling Chopin influenced Vals Champagne, the Estudio de concierto which rivals Liszt for virtuosity, and the famous Tango from España: Seis hojas de Álbum, a set which conjures up Spain in its rhythms, harmonies and sense of drama. + Written a year before the composer’s death, Yvonne en visite! includes a humorous scene during a pupil’s reluctant performance, while the Marcha militar is Albéniz’s earliest work, composed at the age of eight.
ALBÉNIZ Danzas españolas. Pequeños valses. Mazurkas de salon • Guillermo González (pn) • NAXOS 8.572196 (69:42)
Isaac Albéniz wrote some of the defining piano music of the Spanish school. By and large, this is not it. This disc, the third in Naxos’s Albéniz series, is devoted to salon music composed early in the composer’s life. At the time, he was known as a piano virtuoso who also gave lessons to young ladies to whom he dedicated many of his salon pieces, including all six of these mazurkas.
Premonitions of the mature Albéniz may be glimpsed in the Danzas españolas, which shares a pleasant lilt, usually in habanera rhythm, and the composer’s predilection for a melodic line in three against a languid accompanying figure in four. The pieces resemble Granados’s later set of Spanish Dances in their occasional underlying hint of melancholy, but those in Albéniz’s set are neither as formally diverse nor as pianistically challenging as are those of his slightly younger contemporary. Chopin is the predominant influence in the sets of waltzes and mazurkas. Once again the results, while mellifluous and polished, are no comparison to the works of the Polish master in terms of ingenuity and memorability.
González, a noted Albéniz specialist, has the kind of muscular technique necessary to tackle Iberia and the late masterpieces, but lacks delicacy in this refined repertoire. There would be no whispering or throat clearing in his salon! Overall, this is a pleasant collection but unrepresentative of the composer’s most exciting work. If you are curious about the antecedents of Iberia, it is worth a listen.
In the latest volume of this critically admired series, a number of rarely heard pieces from Albéniz’s first compositional phase can be savored. They were composed between 1881 and 1892 and reveal the variety and flair of which he was capable, even in the smallest of musical forms, such as the delightful mazurkas. The Siete estudios (Seven Studies) are no mere exercises – rather they fuse the color of Iberian music with the rigor of Central European traditions. Les Saisons is an evocative portrait of the seasons and can be seen as a forerunner of the impressionistic writing that would soon appear in French music.
Most known for his piano works which were based on folk music idioms, Isaac Albeniz is a figurehead in Spanish classical music. Transcriptions of many of his pieces are part of the classical guitar repertoire, although he never composed for the instrument. Pianist Miguel Angel Rodriguez Laiz studied in Murcia, Madrid, Dallas, and Canada. He currently serves as a piano professor, chamber music professor, and theory professor at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Musica “Victoria Eugenia” de Granada. On this release he presents some of Albeniz’s most colorful and influential piano works, including the Rapsodia espanola.
This latest entry in Naxos' Spanish Classics series is also the ninth and final volume in the Albéniz piano music series. The focus here is on Albéniz’s compositional evolution and his use of inspired folk-based melodies, Hispanic nostalgia and vivid dance rhythms, encapsulated by the intoxicating Chants d’Espagne. The album also includes five works heard in exciting new arrangements for two pianos made expressly for this recording. Miguel Ángel R. Laiz is joined by Santiago L. Sacristán in the works for two pianos.
Alchemize / Rand, University of Southern Mississippi Wind Ensemble
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Dec 01, 2017
Contemporary American music for wind band is among the most varied, colorful and brilliant to be heard anywhere, not least when performed by one of the genre’s leading young ensembles. Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Schwantner is represented by his evocative concerto “Luminosity.” David Maslanka has helped to reshape the wind band sound and “Hosannas,” some of which are based on chorale melodies, are full of moments of self-reflection. These qualities of quiet and timelessness are shared by the first movement of Steven Bryant’s “Alchemy in Silent Spaces.”
Alchemy: New Music for Trumpet & Orchestra / Brum, Royal Orchestra of Sevilla
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Sep 23, 2022
Like alchemists of old, attempting to recombine the four elements, here Fábio Brum presents four distinct musical languages in a program forged during lockdown. Gabriele Roberto’s Tokyo Suite charts the astonishment of a traveler dazzled by the vast megapolis, whereas Dimitri Cervo’s The Brazilian Four Seasons offers a colorful, energetic panorama of the natural and human worlds. Fábio Brum’s very personal musical journey is highlighted by the contrast between the Talmudic contemplation of Menachem Zur’s De Profundis and the abstract ruminations of Nicola Tescari’s Trumpet Concerto ‘Nine Moods.’
Aldridge, Copland: Clarinet Concertos / David Singer
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$19.99Jul 27, 2010
Aaron Copland’s popular Clarinet Concerto, with its tender and poignant opening, highly virtuosic central cadenza and brilliantly jazzy final movement, is preceded by Robert L. Aldridge’s Clarinet Concerto, which has been described as the direct descendant of the Copland. Classical, folk, jazz and klezmer influences are brought together in a work which is infectious in its driving rhythms and soaring melodies. Aldridge’s Samba for clarinet and string quartet is an attempt to make this instrumentation sound like a Latin big-band. David Singer, the acclaimed longtime principal clarinetist of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is joined on this recording by the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet and A Far Cry Orchestra, a Boston-based collective of young professional string players who perform without a conductor and with rotating leadership.
Set just before World War I, Sinclair Lewis’s incendiary novel Elmer Gantry tells a story of old-time religion, illicit romance and revenge. Robert Aldridge and Herschel Garfein’s operatic adaptation is a ‘marvelous amalgam of toe-tapping accessibility’ (Opera News) full of hymns, gospel songs, marches and dance, evoking the period in a score which echoes Gershwin and Copland. This all-American production combines a first-rate cast of singers and a world-class orchestra for an intoxicating experience.
Described by Opera News as “an important addition to the American operatic canon,” Sister Carrie takes as its themes the lure of money and social standing. Robert Aldridge’s inventive score is richly melodic and unapologetically tonal. Herschel Garfein’s libretto is based on Theodore Dreiser’s groundbreaking 1900 novel, which depicts a small-town girl’s tortuous path to fame and her lover’s abject descent into despair. Aldridge and Garfein’s Elmer Gantry was a two-time Grammy Award winner. Here, the lead roles are played by Mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala, baritone Keith Phares, tenor Matt Morgan, and soprano Alisa Suzanne Jordheim.
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REVIEW:
Robert Aldrige’s Sister Carrie is obviously one of the most important additions to America’s present day operatic repertoire. The music is purely tonal and traditionally consists of solo arias, duets and ensembles, it general tenure remaining in the world of mainstream popular opera. Based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser, the plot, too complex to detail here, examines the need for women in the early 20th-Century to use anything — sexual attractions being a good starting point — if they want to climb the social scale, not concerning themselves too much who they hurt on the way up.
In the part of Carrie, the American mezzo Adriana Zabala sings with a dramatic intensity that is ideal for this ‘nothing will stop me’ girl. Keith Phares, as the ill-fated Hurstwood, has a warm baritone voice, and his two joined arias as the central point in the second act are deeply moving. As a foil the light tenor of Matt Morgan makes an ideal Charlie Drouet, who has the good fortune of escaping her clutches. In the cameo role of the socialite, Mrs. Vance, Ariana Douglas, is outstanding, with Alisa Suzzane Jordheim as a vibrant actress, Lola Sterling. Presumably recorded ‘live’ at the opera’s premiere in Milwaukee last October, the balance between singers and orchestra is very well handled, the recording creating an effect of a small venue. There are no stage noises, and thankfully no audience applause during or at the end of acts.
Known more widely as a composer of operas, Franco Alfano also composed a body of chamber music including the three string quartets heard here in world premiere recordings.
String Quartet No. 1 in D major was composed during the First World War between 1914 and 1918. The String Quartet No. 2 in C major In Tre Tempi Collegati, composed in 1925–26, is a smaller scale work than the first, and mostly much more tonal in harmonic structure. The String Quartet No. 3 in G minor was written in 1945 and premiered in Rome on 28 November 1947.
The Quartet comprises violinists Elmira Darvarova and Mary Ann Mumm, violist Craig Mumm and cellist Samuel Magill. The same ensemble can also be heard on the acclaimed Naxos album of Alfano’s Violin Sonata and Piano Quintet (8.572753). Alfano's Cello Sonata and Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano can be heard on 8.570928.
REVIEW:
The first two quartets date from a period that reached from the Great War to the mid-1920s. The opening of the String Quartet No. 1 is a Vivacissimo but the word stands feebly in the face of the torrid, angular tumult that is the first movement. An implacably melodious and fluently flowing Calmo was written as a memorial to his son who died while serving in the Italian military. It is followed by a Largo-Allegro Deciso. The first particle of this movement is a short extension of the mood of its predecessor but soon says a dry-eyed farewell with writing that is, at first, long on a tungsten determination. This is clearly relished by these four players. The music ends with a noble determination that seems to speak of a will to hold it together.
The tonality of the String Quartet No. 2 is placed under less stress than the First Quartet although it is by no means facile listening. It feels inventive. The second movement is marked ‘like a children’s song’. It is a delicate Thumbelina dance of a blossom. The final ‘danse villageoise’ accelerates all the way through.
The 1940s dealt blows to Alfano: much of his music was destroyed in the bombing of Turin and his wife died in 1943. It comes as little surprise that the writing of the first movement of the Third Quartet pierces a path into melancholy. Misty-eyed happiness is recalled but clearly it is not to be experienced again. Joy of a sort is grasped in the next movement, tipping over into the melodic complexity of the powerful Allegro finale. Alfano’s final String Quartet had a Rome premiere in 1947.
The CD’s notes could hardly be more needful – and incidentally meeting that need – when the music is otherwise unknown to all but a few. They are by the disc’s cellist, Samuel Magill. The performances are wondrously fervent, hot-house products. The sound is at your throat, heated and upon you with tiger-like ferocity.
ALFANO Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano. Cello Sonata • Samuel Magill (vc); Scott Dunn (pn); Elmira Darvarova (vn) • NAXOS 8.570928 (60: 06)
These days Franco Alfano (1875–1954) is remembered more for his controversial and much maligned 1926 completion of Puccini’s Turandot than for his own well-crafted and often quite striking music. His career started promisingly. In 1904, his opera Risurrezione, based on Tolstoy’s last full-length novel, made him internationally famous (see Henry Fogel’s review in Fanfare 28:4). In 1918, he rose to the directorship of Liceo Musicale, Bologna, and two years later helped to found the society Musica Nova. His career remained on the ascendancy until 1926, when Toscanini’s de facto damnation of his completion of Turandot made him an odd man out in Italian music. Add to this that two of his contemporaries, Malipiero and Respighi, were changing the focus of Italian music from opera to purely instrumental, while Alfano continued doggedly in the operatic realm with Madonna imperia (1927), Cyrano de Bergerac (1936), Don Juan de Manara (1941), Il dottor Antonia (1949), Vesuvius (1950), and Sakùntala (1952). Then further add that Alfano was on favorable terms with Mussolini’s fascist government and one has a pretty good recipe for his subsequent obscurity.
Then there is the music itself, as illustrated by these two chamber works—soft edged, introspective, and quietly luminous in a most Debussian manner. Cellist Samuel Magill, in his liner notes to this release, points out that Alfano was half French (on his maternal side), and spent the years from 1899 until about 1905 in Paris, where he composed light music for the Folies Bergère. It is plain from these two pieces that he soaked up the atmosphere and found it most congenial. The earlier of these two works, the Cello Sonata, was commissioned in 1928 by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. It is a tour de force in its exploitation of the cello’s full compass and coloristic possibilities. The high A-string writing makes it seem a super violin, and the use of harmonics in combination with quiet sustaining pedaled piano figurations creates moments that would have made both Ravel and Debussy proud. It is a long and discursive work that opens serenely, as if to say “I will reveal a great mystery,” and then travels from the elementally abstract toward the more and more intelligible; unfathomable mystery gives way to unbridled passion, and then to a moment of sublime peace.
The Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano of 1932 is similar to the Cello Sonata, but given the third instrument, the violin, it is richer in tonal possibilities. Its opening revealing a kinship with Renaissance polyphony, indeed farther back than that, shows how easily those languages can dovetail into that of the French Impressionists. Alfano, like Bruckner and Brahms, was an antiquarian. In both of these works, Debussy’s idea that pure sonority should be an element of music equal with melody, harmony, and rhythm, is writ large.
All three performers are excellent and play with razor-edged accuracy, passion, and insight in these two world-premiere recordings. The recording, alas, is harsh in its upper register, requiring treble cut on my system, but, on the other hand, it reveals everything, as if under a microscope. The piano, however, is splendidly registered throughout.
In addition to his operatic achievements, Franco Alfano composed an impressive body of chamber and instrumental works, including the little-known music for piano heard on this recording. His early career as a virtuoso pianist is reflected in works ranging from the Quatre Pieces, with their tributes to Schumann and Mendelssohn, to the Danses napolitaines, inspired by the Neapolitan canzone, the neo-classicism of the Cinq Danses de Cleo de Merode and the quirky rhythms of the Danses roumaines. Recordings of Alfano’s chamber music can be heard on Naxos’ earlier releases. His opera Cyrano de Bergerac, with Placido Domingo in the title role, is available on Naxos DVD and Blu-Ray.
Alfano: Suite romantica; Una danza / Grazioli, Milan Symphony
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Apr 12, 2024
Franco Alfano possessed an innate melodic facility combined with a talent for unexpected timbres. From the neo-Classical Divertimento to the noirish post-war Nenia, the lightness of touch of Amour… Amour… to the impressionistic Una danza and luxuriously orchestrated Suite romantica, each work reveals a different aspect of this multifaceted composer. This release of world premiere recordings features the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano conducted by Giuseppe Grazioli who makes his Naxos début.
REVIEW:
Franco Alfano (1875–1954) remains a marginal figure in musical life despite a fair degree of coverage in record catalogs. Yet he is a thoroughly original composer, one who possessed an innate melodic gift combined with a talent for unexpected timbres, as can be heard in the lavishly orchestrated Suite romantica. The half-hour work is heard on this album in a very colorful and expressive, excellently performed interpretation.
With Una danza, completely different colors are expressed and one may hear an influence of Debussy. This is followed by Nenia, a somewhat melancholy solo piece for accordion, sensitively played by Davide Vendramin, which finds its counterpart in the Aria of the Divertimento, even if the outer movements are very lively and playful.
The program, pleasing and excellently played, ends with the Waltz Amour… Amour…, originally composed for piano in 1901 and orchestrated in 1928.
Alfano' chamber music is receiving deserved recognition. The Violin Sonata is a powerful and impressive work, with elements of French impressionism, but essentially post-romantic in ethos. The Piano Quintet was Alfano' last chamber work, premiered in 1946.
Although Australian by birth, Alfred Hill spent much of his youth in New Zealand before embarking on studies in Leipzig, where he met Brahms, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. + A prolific symphonist and operatic composer, he also wrote a sequence of seventeen notable string quartets. + His style evolved constantly, the influence of Dvořák leading on to the impressionism of his mid-period. + By the time of the String Quartets Nos. 12 to 14 his mastery of technique – in his younger days he had played in a prominent string quartet – ensure that the music is balanced, subtle, and full of playful wit. + This is the fifth of six volumes of the complete Alfred Hill String Quartets.
The four violin sonatas by Alfred Schnittke (1934–98) could be seen as representing four distinct periods in his life and career. The newly discovered Violin Sonata (1955) was a student work, so it did not receive a place in his official catalog. It anticipates none of Schnittke’s later experimental or dramatically extravagant devices, consisting of a largely romantic first movement featuring an adept and impulsive, if generic, development of his material, and a folk-like second-movement theme subjected to three distinct variations. The so-called First Sonata (1963) is a large leap forward in risk-taking and character, the first movement beginning with a 12-tone theme presented in concisely lyrical and eloquent fashion, followed by a gnomish dance; a reserved, hymnlike movement with Messiaenic piano accompaniment; and a lilting, quasi-fugal finale. The Sonata No. 2 (1968), subtitled “Quasi una Sonata,” was one of his breakthrough works—a single, extended, intuitively designed movement that plays with the conventional relationship between the two instruments, breaks apart and juxtaposes material of varying stylistic demeanor and mood, and employs advanced techniques, especially in the violin. By the time of his Sonata No. 3 (1994), Schnittke had suffered several near-death illnesses and many of his works of this period, such as this one, display a deeply contemplative melancholy and passionate outbursts suggesting a metaphysical struggle. There are moments here, especially in the stark, sparse passages of the final two movements, reminiscent of Shostakovich’s late-in-life violin and viola sonatas.
This being the only currently available collection of all four sonatas on a single disc, it is fortunate that violinist Carolyn Huebl and pianist Mark Wait make such a convincing argument for each of these distinctive works. They handle the variety and contrasts of Schnittke’s polystylistic perspective with sensitivity and security, and adapt their impressive tonal resources to every demand the composer makes. It’s a shame that Gidon Kremer, such a strong advocate for Schnittke’s violin concertos, has not (yet?) turned his attention to the sonatas, although he has recorded the orchestral version of the Sonata No. 2 that Schnittke made in 1987. (There is also an orchestral version of the Sonata No. 1, dating from 1968.) For the historically minded, Mark Lubotsky, who premiered the three numbered sonatas, recorded the First and Second for Ondine with pianist Ralf Gothóni, and, on another Ondine disc, documented the Third with the added bonus of the composer’s wife, Irina Schnittke, on piano. The Joanna Kurkowicz/Sergey Schepkin duo has received praise in these pages for their Bridge recording of the first two as well. But if you’re in the market for an engaging and inexpensive introduction to this music, you need look no further.
A gifted musician, writer and watercolourist, Hugo Alfven is regarded in his native Sweden as the most significant composer after Berwald. The Fifth Symphony occupied Alfven throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and draws on themes from his ambitious 1923 ballet.
Alfvén: Synnöve Of Solbakken (Suite), Etc / Willén, Et Al
Naxos
CD · 1 disc
$19.99May 29, 2007
ALFVÉN Synnøve Solbakken. En Bygdesaga. Elegy at Emil Sjögren’s Funeral • Niklas Willén, cond; Norrköping SO • NAXOS 8.557828 (73:12)
Niklas Willén’s Alfvén survey for Naxos continues apace with the sixth release in a series that has already covered the composer’s five symphonies plus assorted miscellaneous works with four different orchestras. This puts Willén and Naxos in head-to-head competition with Neeme Järvi on BIS in a survey that has the possible advantage of a single orchestra—the Stockholm Philharmonic.
With this latest installment, Willén mines Alfvén’s rich vein of music for film and stage. Originally screened in Stockholm in 1934, Synnøve Solbakken is a recasting of sorts of the Romeo and Juliet theme, but this time with a happy ending: boy and girl fall in love, but there’s bad blood between the parents. Boy is stabbed and temporarily paralyzed, but experiences an amazing Freudian recovery when he is called upon to save his father who is injured in an accident. Not having seen the film, the ending makes no sense to me at all, but somehow this miraculous incident reconciles the two families, and everyone lives happily ever after. Apparently, I’m not alone in my confusion. A critic at the time liked the lead actor and Alfvén’s music, but judged the overriding interest of the plot to be the landscape and the cows. Alfvén incorporated into the score music from his ballet-pantomime Bergakungen, as well as a number of Norwegian folk tunes.
Based on a novel by Vilhelm Moberg, Mans kvinna (literally, “Man’s woman”), the movie version hit the screen 10 years later, in 1944. Darker and more psychologically complex, it tells the story of an illicit affair between a woman trapped in a dull marriage to a farmer and her attraction to a handsome young farmhand. When the farmer learns of his wife’s infidelity, he essentially places her under house arrest, claiming her as his legal property—“chattel,” I believe, is the now politically incorrect word that would have been used. The lovers end up escaping together, but the story was probably meant more as social criticism of the attitudes towards women and their rights than it was intended as a tale of lusting after the flesh. From his film score Alfvén extracted a suite to which he gave the less provocative title, En Bygdesaga (“A Country Tale”). But the music remains reflective of its subject matter—i.e., it’s not in the folksy style of Synnøve Solbakken, but considerably more dramatic and serious in tone.
Alfvén wrote for the live stage as well as for film, and in 1932 he provided incidental music to Ludvig Nördstrom’s play, Vi (“We”). One of the numbers from that score was played at the funeral services of Swedish composer Emil Sjögren (1853–1918), and was later published as a standalone piece, the Elegy, op. 38. Though very beautiful, little about it sounds elegiac. It reminded me a bit of the funeral music from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Not one to throw away a good piece of music—Sjögren after all could only be elegized once—Alfvén subsequently incorporated it, along with other numbers from Vi, into yet another suite, Gustav II Adolf, op. 49.
If you have any familiarity with Alfvén, you will already know that he was more a product of the 19th century than of the 20th, as were so many Scandinavian composers of the time. You will also know that his music is of a rich, romantic tonal opulence that often has much in common with Swedish contemporaries, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger and Wilhelm Stenhammar. If you are not familiar with Alfvén, this release is as good a place as any to whet your appetite. Performances and recording are exemplary. Highly recommended.
