Germanic symphonies from a Norwegian composer

Christian Sinding - The Symphonies

Christian Sinding's four symphonies were written during the early (1 & 2), middle (3) and late (4) periods of the Norwegian composer's career. They're well constructed and tuneful works, if not especially profound, and they receive excellent performances from the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Karl-Heinz Steffens.

Orchestral music from the first half of the 20th century is full of works representing the folkloric heritage of many great composers: Villa-Lobos, Bartok, Martinu, Janacek, and, among the Norwegians, Geirr Tveitt and Harald Sæverud. However, Sinding is not especially interested in Norwegian themes, and indeed he spent much of his time living in Germany. His music is strongly influenced by the German tradition, and as a determined musical conservative his music is full of echoes of Wagner, Strauss, Pfitzner and even Brahms and Schumann.

Sinding's Symphony no. 1, from 1894, is by no means a juvenile work; the composer was in his 38th year when he completed it, though he had been working on it for a decade. It shows an assurance in marshalling the resources of a large orchestra, and a light touch in developing some often interesting musical material. It's as if Sinding was being especially careful to stay away from self-seriousness. The Second Symphony is much weaker. It's a rather plodding work that unfortunately lacks the lighter touch of the previous work. Luckily, it's shorter than no. 1, with only three movements.

The gem of this album, though, is Sinding's Third Symphony. There's a very positive energy throughout, but especially in the fine first movement. The fourth movement finale is a kind of celebratory remix of Wagner's Die Meistersinger; I really enjoyed this! Symphony no. 4, from 1936, is subtitled "Frost and Spring - Rhapsody for Orchestra". It's another appealing piece of music, a tableau of generally optimistic themes, though without any strong sense of structure. 

Sinding is going his own way in his symphonies, more or less heedless of prevailing modernist musical trends, whether neo-classical or more avant garde. His way, to be sure, is on a fairly narrow path set out 50 years earlier by the 19th century German masters, but Sinding always retains his own musical voice.

The main rivals to this new Capriccio disc are two CPO albums from Hannover: Thomas Dausgaard's first two symphonies from 2007, and David Porcelijn's third & fourth symphonies from 2004. Though I prefer these earlier, warmer, interpretations by the slightest of margins, the rather drier and cooler Norwegian versions often suit Sinding's music. With clear and lifelike sound from Capriccio, this album is warmly recommended, for three of four symphonies at least.

This album will be released on February 7, 2025.

An intense ending to a wonderful series

 Allan Pettersson: Symphony 15; Viola Concerto

This is the final release in the BIS series of Allan Pettersson's Symphonies, with Christian Lindberg conducting the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. It's been such a fascinating and revealing journey, shining a light on one of the most remarkable series of works by any 20th century artist. This is now the undisputed champion of Pettersson Symphony cycles on disc, though the recordings by Sergiu Comissiona and Alun Francis have their positive qualities as well. 

The 15th Symphony, from 1978, is a late work; only one more remained before the composer died in 1980 (there were fragments of the 17th Symphony as well, which is included in this series). Symphony 15 exhibits Pettersson's usual dense textures, intense emotions and carefully contrived segments put together into an impressive architecture. This is by now second nature to Lindberg and his fine musicians, though there is no hint of routine; this is a fresh sounding performance that is well served by the always accomplished BIS engineers.

Pettersson's Viola Concerto came at the very end of his life, and wasn't performed until 1988. Like the 2nd Violin Concerto and the 16th Symphony, written in the same period, this work has very much of an orchestral rather than a concerto texture, with little attention paid to the usual solo pyrotechnics. Pettersson referred to the Violin Concerto as a Symphony, and the Symphony as a Saxophone Concerto, while his widow Gudrun called this work a "Viola Symphony". As with the 2nd Violin Concerto, it's tempting to think of the solo instrument here as a representation of the composer himself, commenting as an individual estranged from but deeply connected to the world of the orchestra. The viola was Pettersson's instrument, so I don't think it's too far-fetched. If that's the case, it's perhaps ironic that the composer should represent his own alienation from the world, a result of both his temperament and his severe, chronic rheumatoid arthritis, by integrating the solo part so closely with the whole orchestra.

Violist Ellen Nisbeth gets a beautiful sound from her Nicolò Amati instrument, from 1714. This is a great way to cap off a wonderful series.

Into the abyss

Allan Pettersson: Violin Concerto no. 2, Symphony no. 17, fragment

Allan Pettersson wrote his Second Violin Concerto just after he completed his 13th Symphony, in 1976. He referred to it as a Symphony for Violin and Orchestra, but this is no Symphonie Concertante, where a solo instrument shares its virtuosity with orchestral players. Rather, it's a more modern, searching expression of a classic tale: the individual vs. the collective. It's easy to imagine why the semi-invalid Pettersson, shut up in his apartment suffering from his acute, chronic rheumatoid arthritis, would explore the lone voice struggling to be heard over the powerful sound of the orchestra/universe. This is a work that's all about this balance, and since the premiere performance with Ida Haendel in Stockholm on January 25, 1980, there has been much controversy concerning this key point. Was Pettersson unaware of how the violin would sound against the powerful writing of his orchestral forces? Did he design the work to be heard over the radio (as he heard it from his apartment) or on a recording rather than live in a concert hall? Things went back and forth between the critics, until the composer weighed in:

The solo violin is eliminated as regards audibility – something that the composer has consciously chosen – by letting the soloist often play in unison with the leading parts. The composer lets the soloist fill in passages totally inaudibly within the orchestral mass.

This, of course, is a challenge for today's recording producers and engineers: they're very good at allowing us to hear every detail in a score through technological means plus microphone choice and placement, as well as the choice of recording venue to find a proper acoustic to match the music. Luckily, in this case, we're dealing with BIS, whose default is rich and full rather than bright and exposed. And we have the Pettersson Dream Team in Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, who are completely at home in the music of the great composer, as they come to the end of their epic traversal of Allan Pettersson's complete works. Finally, the musicianship of violinist Ulf Wallin wins out, over, I might imagine, some of the more ego-driven soloists of his most ego-drenched instrument. In the end one hears the sad, even agonizing music as it was designed by Pettersson, and the touches of grace and redemption that occur, particularly toward the end, are all the sweeter for it.

The short fragment that might have become the 17th Symphony does not break new ground, nor show the way to any major turns on their way from the composer's music written before. It's the last music Pettersson wrote, so one goes in with the same feeling as with the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem or the unfinished final fugue in Bach's Art of the Fugue. Lindberg and his fine musicians give this often robust music a straight-forward, unsentimental reading, and they let the way it shuffles off at the end, into the silence, speak for itself. Let it echo in the silence for a while when you listen to it; this says as much about the abyss as whole symphonies.

This disc will be released on May 3, 2019.

The best introduction into Pettersson's dark & serious world

Allan Pettersson: Symphonies 5, 7

Christian Lindberg continues on his way to a new complete Pettersson symphonies cycle for BIS, for The Allan Pettersson Project 2013-2019, a joint project with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra.  It was clear from the previous releases that this is now the set to get, though the symphonies by Sergiu Comissiona and Alun Francis both contain excellent work. The new disc underlines this, especially considering the outstanding 7th Symphony, probably the most popular in the series.

In a lifetime of pain and suffering Allan Pettersson had the great solace of music, and at times he must have seen a road ahead that was less fraught. The premiere of his 5th Symphony in 1963 was quite a success, and contributed to his award of a lifetime minimum income from the Swedish government. His music began to be denigrated, though, not for its modern idiom, but for not being modern enough. Pettersson always seemed out of sync with the world in which he lived, though from today's vantage point this music seems to evoke all of the ambiguities of the post-war world, the echoes of past horrors along with a tentative groping for transcendence.

The 7th Symphony, which had its first performance with Antal Dorati and the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra fifty years ago this fall, in October 1968, was an even greater success, and propelled the work into the orchestral repertoire until today, at least in Sweden and Germany. This is a great work that perhaps provides the best introduction into the rather daunting, dark and serious world of Allan Pettersson.

Anguish, solace, beauty

Allan Pettersson's music comes from a place of pain and anguish - a hard childhood under a brute of a father and the lifelong burden of a chronic, debilitating disease - but it's also full of the solace and beauty which comes from the Northern landscape and from reserves within himself. With incredible discipline and strength of purpose Pettersson built an awesome symphonic legacy which rivals that of the great 20th century masters Nielsen, Sibelius, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. "No one in the 1950s noticed that I am always breaking up the structures," he said later in the decade, "that I was creating a whole new symphonic form." By the mid-1970s Pettersson was creating long, complex music in a style of his own that veered between the Sibelian model, atonality, serialism and neo-romanticism, with layers of meaning for those willing to make the effort.

This BIS release is part of The Allan Pettersson Project 2013-2018, a joint project with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and conductor Christian Lindberg that will create a complete cycle to go alongside those by Sergiu Comissiona and Alun Francis. This series is well on the way to establishing supremacy, due to Lindberg's command of Pettersson's underlying structures, his players' virtuosity and musicianship and the clear and lifelike sound provided by BIS.  This disc drops on March 3, 2017; it is very highly recommended.

Exciting world premiere recordings

From June 20, 2013:

Vagn Holmboe's 2nd Violin Concerto deserves to be included in the same group of 20th Century violin concertos as those by Sibelius, Nielsen, Prokofiev, Walton, Berg, Stravinsky and Bartok. The Viola Concerto has much less company, but this is an impressive work as well. The soloists on this exciting new DaCapo release are truly excellent. Violinist Erik Heide and violist Lars Anders Tomter both shine, and they're given superb support by the Norrkoping Symphony under conductor Dima Slobodeniouk.

The orchestra has its own moment to shine in Holmboe's Concerto for Orchestra, a work by the 20-year old composer that has never been performed before now. This brass-heavy neo-classical work has a sound of its own that I really like, though it's much less technically assured than the violin and viola concertos which show the mastery of orchestration Holmboe attained after fifty more years of composition.

All the works on this splendid CD are world premiere recordings. DaCapo gives the entire project the highest level of production values, from engineering to packaging design. The solid slipcase, the liner notes by Jens Cornelius, the artwork, the recording and production, the performances and the album concept: everything is deluxe, and all in support of some of the most exciting new music I've heard in years.