Allan Pettersson

* Symphony No. 3 (1954-55)
* Symphony No. 15 (1978)

Norrkoeping Symphony Orchestra/Leif Segerstam
BIS CD-680 Total time: 70:52

Summary for the Busy Executive: Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your
hats.  We are taking a ride through hell.

Of all Scandinavian composers excepting Nielsen and Sibelius, Pettersson
has the most to say to me.  He conforms to no Northern stereotype, except
perhaps the Strindberg one.  Joy in nature, for example - so prominent
in writers like Grieg, Tveitt, and Nielsen - finds no place in his work.
Indeed, one meets with joy only rarely, if at all, in Pettersson's output.
Pettersson's music grits its teeth against pain and demons, and he
suffered from quite a bit of both, from a childhood that would have made
Little Nell's seem rosy up through an agony-filled arthritic adulthood
that kept him confined almost to one room.  Transcendence, if it comes
(and there's no guarantee), is hard-won and highly provisional.

Although he wrote well in a few other genres, the center of Pettersson's
achievement lies, for me, in his cycle of fifteen symphonies (numbered
2 through 16; the first symphony is at this moment lost).  The works in
Pettersson's catalogue, with few exceptions, always strike me as marathon
runs - not that they're necessarily long, but they do take mental stamina.
It's not the tired question of tonal vs.  atonal, either, that makes
them so.  The symphonies are firmly tonal.  However, they are also packed
with ideas, all of which the composer continuously varies.

The Third typifies Petterson's method.  For many years, he considered
it his best symphony, and one can see why.  The argument and its
presentation are relatively clear.  The orchestration is - compared to
something like the second violin concerto - lean and mean.  The work
falls into four movements - moderato, slow, scherzo, and allegro finale
- the last three played without a break. But that's about where its
relation to the traditional symphony stops.  As far as I can tell without
a score, all the thematic material derives from a single opening idea,
again continuously varied.  Pettersson plays with a shape as much as
with actual notes - turning it upside-down, flipping it backwards,
changing an interval here and there to tremendous effect, altering its
rhythms and tempi.  The symphony begins with an introduction where ideas
jostle against and interrupt one another.  You begin to wonder how you
will keep all this stuff in your head.  Then you realize that it's the
same essential idea in different guises.  The main rhetorical gambit is
the violent interruption, as the texture and character of the music
changes, and this sets up a tension with the thematic unity of the work.
Pettersson keeps threatening to rip everything apart texturally even as
he stitches it all together thematically.  In the last three movements,
the end of one movement foreshadows the beginning of the next - an update
of Beethoven's famous transition from the scherzo to the finale of his
Fifth.  However, this is most obviously true between the first and second
movements, even though the composer specifies a normal interstitial
pause.  The last two notes of the first movement become the first two
notes of the second.  Still, this is not the usual symphonic building
of a seamless argument that gets you from here to there.  Pettersson
employs the musical equivalent of movie jump cuts.  There are more violent
gashes in this work than in the face of Karloff's Frankenstein.

The second movement flows the smoothest, with nevertheless the occasional
head-snapping shift, but the layout of the argument occurs over a very
long span.  This movement also contains some of the few moments of
Petterssonian tenderness, but melancholy never stays away too long.
Sharp dissonances gradually intrude, only to subside, like waves of pain.
I experience the movement overall as resignation.

The third movement begins with the worrying of tiny ideas, like someone
feeling out his toothache with his tongue.  It finally explodes into the
finale.  Again, one feels the disjointedness of the movement, as if it
can't decide whether it's a Mahlerian Landler, waltz, or march.  Ideas
- or rather gestures, since all ideas in this symphony are siblings -
from earlier movements are recalled.  Pettersson builds up a terrific
head of steam nevertheless, and the power of it all carries you over the
jumps and twists.  It's a nightmare landscape - ghosts and demons soaring
and screaming across desolation.  This is the real soundtrack of Mordor.
Toward the end, we hear a deeply-felt lament - almost chorale-like - but
it doesn't lead to glimpses of heaven.  It tries to settle for a way to
end.  The music burbles with a questioning figure, tries for a burst of
anger, which fizzles almost immediately, and ends on the abrupt question.
In feeling, it reminds me of the epilogue to the Vaughan Williams sixth,
except that Pettersson doesn't indulge himself with the luxury of space.
He presents his enigma more directly than Vaughan Williams does his, and
seems to point to something bleaker as well.

Swedish television commissioned Pettersson's Fifteenth, but as the liner
notes point out, Pettersson usually filled such obligations with works
he was writing anyway.  The economy of idea which we encounter in the
Third has become even more stringent.  In fact, one doesn't meet themes
as much as gestures: richly-scored chords in isolation, scurrying strings,
drum rolls.  The symphony plays out in one movement, with major subdivisions:
a battleground of an allegro, a slow lament, in which the opening material
reappears in longer note values and less aggressively, a conflict between
the battle and the lament with some question as to which will win out.

As I say, the first movement rolls across like a war. It builds to a
terrific climax and breaks into a troubled lament, like the drizzle that
hangs on after a huge thunderstorm.  Gradually, another front moves in,
and we get to a rhetorical conflict between the music in long notes and
the music in short ones.  Toward the end, the music seems to settle into
a chorale-dirge, but even here the martial elements intrude and threaten
to overwhelm.  For Pettersson, symphonic growth comes through conflict,
and the resolution is in doubt to the end.  "Resolution" is probably the
wrong word.  Nothing is psychically resolved.  The slow music wins out
but by taking on the aggression of the fast, and this symphony also ends
without settling anything.

Segerstam and his orchestra take up these works like heroes.  Not many
people program Pettersson in the first place, because it takes a commitment
to hard work - mental, as well as musical - without any guarantee of
reward, even the reward of praise.  While I can imagine both symphonies
better played, these performances burn with dedication to Pettersson's
austere world, and kudos to Bis for making these things available.
Pettersson I doubt will ever become a popular taste, but his adherents
are a fierce bunch, hungry for more.

Steve Schwartz