Ulf Wallin, Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra, Christian Lindberg – Allan Pettersson – Violin Concerto & Symphony No.17 (fragment) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:06 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
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, realised 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 disc 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.
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Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestra, Christian Lindberg – Stenhammar: Serenade & Excelsior (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:19 minutes | 1011 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © eClassical
‘Finland has Sibelius, Norway has Grieg and Denmark Nielsen – so what about Sweden?’ This question, often put to Swedish musicians and music-lovers, is one that has no simple answer. Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927), a personal friend of both Sibelius and Nielsen, would seem to be the obvious candidate – but when his name is suggested the usual reaction is ‘Stenhammar who?’
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Arctic Philharmonic, Christian Lindberg – Bernstein: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 59:43 minutes | 1004 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © BIS
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.
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Antwerp Symphony Orchestra & Christian Lindberg – Stenhammar: Symphony No. 2 & Ett drömspel (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:23 minutes | 1010 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Considered to be one of the great Nordic symphonies of its time, Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Symphony No. 2 in G minor was a long time in the making. Stenhammar the conductor and pianist was a leading figure in the musical life of Sweden and Scandinavia, but in his role as composer he struggled with self-doubt, feeling that his knowledge of musical theory was insufficient. In 1910 he decided to address this perceived shortcoming, and began an intensive study of counterpoint which included setting himself several thousand assignments over the following decade. At the same time, between 1911 and 1915, Stenhammar composed his G minor symphony, and against this background it is hardly surprising that it displays his preoccupation with counterpoint, its final movement a grandiose double fugue.
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Antwerp Symphony Orchestra & Christian Lindberg – Christian Lindberg: Orchestral Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:44 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
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 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’.
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Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, Christian Lindberg – Pettersson: Symphony No. 14 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:38 minutes | 972 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
In their series of Allan Pettersson’s symphonies, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have arrived at the Fourteenth Symphony, completed in 1978 and given its first performance in 1981, one year after the death of the composer. As several of its predecessors, No. 14 is in one extended movement and is scored for large forces, including an expanded percussion section. But there are also important traits that set it apart. Pettersson, who had studied twelve-tone composition for René Leibovitz in the early 1950’s, never adopted the technique fully but in the present work the traces are more evident than in his other symphonies: the opening few bars contain all of the notes of the chromatic scale, and throughout the work Pettersson makes extensive use of compositional techniques associated with twelve-tone music. In several earlier works, Pettersson had alluded to his song cycle ‘Barefoot Songs’, but in the present symphony he quotes himself extensively – the melody of Klokar och knythänder (Wise Men and Clenched Hands) appears no less than five times in its entirety and becomes crucial to the structure of the symphony. The present disc is the sixth instalment in a series that has received distinctions such as Empfehlung (klassik-heute.de), Clef d’or 2011 (ResMusica.com), isco excepcional (Scherzo) and Critics’ Choice (Gramophone). Included with the new recording is a bonus DVD containing a film produced by Swedish Television after the death of the composer. In the course of the film, here provided with English subtitles, we meet the composer himself, members of his family, colleagues from his time as an orchestral player and musicians such as the violinist Ida Haendel.
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