Stenhammar - Symphony 2 - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

Markus Stenz - Symphony 2 [SUPER-AUDIO CD] date 07/26/2011

It was in 1953, 65 years ago, that Herbert Blomstedt conducted the Gothenburg Symphony for the first time. Since then he has been back on numerous occasions, performing a wide range of works - only not those by Wilhelm Stenhammar. Blomstedt has told of how an international career gave him little opportunity to study and conduct Stenhammar's music. At the age of 85, however, when he no longer had any obligations as a chief conductor, he thought 'now or never' and began to study the composer's major scores in earnest. And when the time came to perform and record them, what other orchestra could he choose but the Gothenburg Symphony - Stenhammar's 'own' orchestra which he conducted between 1907 and 1922. The works on this disc are possibly the finest orchestral music that Stenhammar composed and he gave the premières of both with the orchestra, Symphony No. 2 in 1915 and the revised version of the Serenade in 1920. In fact, he even dedicated the symphony to the members of the orchestra, his 'dear friends'.

Beginning his first (never completed) symphony in 1951 and working on his 17th when he died in 1980, Allan Pettersson during three decades concerned himself almost exclusively with the symphonic genre and this at a time when many composers considered the symphony (and indeed the symphony orchestra) to be hopelessly old-fashioned. Pettersson, however, was deeply committed to the genre, something which in Sweden during the early 1960s was so unusual that he was called Inchthe last symphonistInch. He completed his Symphony No.13 in August 1976, as a commission by the Bergen Festival for it's 25th anniversary the following year. The complexity and large scale of the work was such that the first performance was postponed for another year, however and in fact the work had never been performed in Sweden until Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra played it in concert in 2014. As the majority of Pettersson's symphonies it is in one movement, harboring the great contrasts between an atonal and a traditional, tonal idiom that characterize the composer's musical language. A noteworthy feature in the present work is the presence of many brief allusions to other composers, from Beethoven (with the theme to the Fifth Symphony) to D-S-C-H, the musical cryptogram of Shostakovich's name. Over the course of four previous discs, Christian Lindberg and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have demonstrated a true affinity with Pettersson's music, an affinity that deepens with each new recording.