Wilhelm Stenhammar

* Saengen (The Song)*
* 2 Sentimental Romances**
* Ithaka^

Iwa Soerenson (soprano), Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo), Stefan Dahlberg
(tenor), Per-Arne Walgren (baritone), Swedish Radio Choir, Chamber Choir of
the State Academy of Music in Stockholm, Adolf Fredrik Music School
Children's Choir*
Arve Tellefsen (violin)**
Haekan Hagegaerd (baritone)^
Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Herbert Blomstedt*, Stig Westerberg**,
Kjell Ingebretsen^
Caprice CAP21358 Total time: 57:06

Summary for the Busy Executive: Mostly terrific.

My first encounter with Stenhammar's music turned out a fluke.  Although
a virtuoso pianist, he wrote very little for his instrument.  Naturally,
I first heard two very powerful piano fantasies (two of the three
Fantasies, op. 11), also atypical of the composer's style, sounding
more like the Rachmaninoff of the second piano concerto.  Still, they
made me mark Stenhammar as a composer to look for.

Stenhammar in many ways strikes me as an "unfinished" composer - not in
craft, but in finding his voice.  He died in his fifties and suffered
through at least one very long creative block.  He also had a substantial
career as pianist and conductor.  Among other things, he was the first
in Sweden to take up Mahler.  Items in his catalogue differ substantially
in idiom.  He tries on a lot of voices as he works toward one of his
own.  For me, he sounds most at ease in an idiom based on Swedish folk
music, combined with rigorous craft, Romantic expression, and imaginative
counterpoint.  Works of this type include his Symphony No. 2 in g-minor
and the Serenade in F, as well as the fifth string quartet (subtitled
"Serenade"), all fairly late.  But I'm not inflexible about it.  You can
find wonderful items in his catalogue throughout his career.

The three items on the program come from all over Stenhammar's composing
career - from Ithaka of 1904, to the Two Sentimental Romances of 1910,
to his final completed work, The Song of 1921.  I would deal fairly
shortly with the Sentimental Romances.  They're very well and very sparely
written.  However, they're also salon morceaux.  They don't aim all that
high, and, and after they finish, they disappear from consciousness like
fog in sun.

The other two pieces are, to my mind, magnificent.  They sound the
way you think Nordic music should sound: strongly influenced by nature -
snow, wind, and ocean - with a certain heroic impetus.  This is especially
true of Ithaka, essentially a concert aria of 1904.  It reminds me a bit
of Grieg's Landkjenning, with the roll of the sea in it, but this type
of genre painting probably derives ultimately from Wagner's Fliegende
Hollaender.  The text, part of a poem by Oscar Levertin, tells of
Odysseus's longing for his home country and his attempts to sail there.
The poet thinly disguises a nationalist sentiment.  Stenhammar's music,
at any rate, makes very clear that the home country is Sweden.

The Song was Stenhammar's last major work.  It has a text by Stenhammar's
friend, composer and poet Ture Rangstroem.  Stenhammar asked him to write
something specifically for the work.  In English, the poem comes over
as claptrap, deriving its images largely from the second part of Goethe's
Faust while leaving the intellect of that poem alone.  It makes very
little sense from sentence to sentence, even granting the poet the
customary license, although one can easily enough recognize this as yet
another nationalist paean.  The song, of course, represents the spirit
of Sweden.  Rangstroem personifies it as a beautiful, shy girl, which
would probably annoy the old Swedish raiders no end.  The worst I can
say about the text is that it's tainted by the Literary.  Shortly after
completing the cantata, Stenhammar, forced by bad health, moved into
seclusion, and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1927, still in his
fifties.  For my money, The Song is his greatest piece, even though it
doesn't quite hang together stylistically.  It shows an energetic,
questing mind.  It's full of things you expect and things you don't.

The work opens with some post-Wagnerian angst, with tropes from the Ring,
as the text talks about Suffering Sweden.  Actually, Rangstroem's passage
comes across as a literary device - From Darkness to Light - rather than
anything from real life.  The music, however, convinces all by itself,
and this happens throughout the work.  About a third of the way through
the first part of the cantata, there's a beautiful moment, where the
music seems to suspend time (the text describes daybreak), largely given
to solo soprano and women's chorus.  From here to the end of the first
part, we get gorgeous musical pastoralism (for me, Stenhammar's strong
suit) and Stenhammar speaking for himself.  The choral writing throughout
is inspired and complex in a typically Late Romantic way (Mahler's Eighth
and Strauss's Deutsche Motette probably represent the zenith of the
style), interweaving with the orchestra, sometimes as another orchestral
color, sometimes in the forefront with subtle orchestral support.  The
range of expression seems to continually widen, and the first part ends
in a blaze.

Then comes a solemn, chorale-like "Interlude" for orchestra alone, very
much indebted to Bruckner's slow movements.  But it's a great example
of the genre, and it's often (in Sweden) done all by itself.  The second
part proper opens with an unearthly, beautiful sound from the orchestra
and a children's chorus (reminded me of the opening to the second part
of Mahler's Eighth, without the taint of imitation), again where the
music seems to be holding its breath.  The soloists enter with a dancing
rhythm and things liven up in a hurry.  We're back to Swedish pastorale.
After a darkly chromatic transition, we're into something "rich and
strange": essentially, Beethoven's Ninth seen through the lens of Late
Romanticism.  Bits of the slow movement and the finale flit in and out,
occasionally taking center stage for the instant it takes to snap your
head, and then melting back into the Swedish singing and dancing.  The
work ends in poetic quiet.

Tellefsen and Westerberg do what they can with the Romances, except
resuscitate them, but Stenhammar doesn't give them much to work with.
However, the performers in Ithaka and Saengen surpass the merely good.
Hagegaerd doesn't have the most gorgeous baritone voice in the world,
but he has always communicated like gangbusters.  I don't even understand
Swedish, but I know what he's singing about.  The performers in Saengen
surpass even this.  The work itself is incredibly difficult, both in its
complexity of texture (orchestra, two choirs, four soloists, moving in
and out in an intricate dance) and in its change of musical and style
and mood.  The choral writing, like the choral writing in Mahler's Eighth,
lies beyond most large choruses.  Blomstedt gets his orchestra and chorus
to sound as straightforward as folk music.  This is an amazing performance.
Anne Sofie von Otter stands among the soloists, but it's early in her
career.  She doesn't stand out, although she's very good indeed.  The
prize goes to Iwa Soerenson, a thrillingly sweet soprano, of whom I know
nothing except for what she does here.  Blomstedt almost always gets
the music flowing clearly.  He pulls together all the threads Stenhammar
has left for him.  For me, he's always been a maddeningly inconsistent
conductor - sometimes pedestrian, sometimes magnificent.  He's magnificent
here.  If you're interested in Scandinavian music, this strikes me as
an essential disc.

Steve Schwartz