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Allan Pettersson (1911-1980)
Symphony No 15 (1978)
Fantaisie pour alto seul (1936)
Viola Concerto (1979)
Ellen Nisbeth (viola)
Norrköping Symphony Orchestra/Christian Lindberg
rec. 2020, Norrköping, Sweden
BIS BIS-2480 SACD [68]

BIS are well recognised for their dedication and fortitude. These qualities are both admirable and costly and they are not lavished on music that lacks merit and reward. Performances and sound in their Pettersson orchestral series play to these strengths and are in the elite class. Here is one very short early work and two from his late and illness-dominated years.

The Fifteenth Symphony is not long - at least not for Swedish composer, Allan Pettersson. Appreciation of these tough tonal single movement works is facilitated by being tracked in many segments. These are identified in the booklet by reference to score bar numbers. Tracks progress without a bump or drawing of breath. As to the Fifteenth Symphony, the four-minute section marked ‘beginning’ is typically splenetic and unforgiving. It moves remorselessly onwards via brief contributions for solo violin. The music is overwrought, tense and malcontented, though with moments of ambiguously brassy triumph blent with tragedy. 

At times, Pettersson parallels the whooping horns in Robert Simpson’s Fifth Symphony (1972) although neither composer had heard either of these specific works. There are moments when the thunder clouds recede as at tracks 3 and 5 but there is still static in the air - static crying out to be discharged. Much of track 3 sounds like a trudge through cinder and ash mountains with coal-black devils rising up and yowling. In tracks. 4 and 5, Nielsen-like calls figure in the scenery but these denote small instants of similarity, not influence.

At thirty-six minutes this Symphony is by no means the longest of his works of the seventies (for example No 9 is seventy-one minutes long) when symphonies 9-16 were written. Even across this comparative concision, the sense is of each moment of snatched colossal victory being subverted by horrific defeat. One teeters on the brink of the other. In track 8 there is some Apollonian, even Mahlerian (track 9: 1.09), remission in which to revel so it is not quite all torturous ambivalence. Something suggesting anthemic submission or reconciliation imbues track 10. Pettersson will not let go of his seething, charnel ways though and they return perseverant.

Lindberg handles this score well and makes of it something that can be, if not enjoyed, then leaves the attentive listener chidden, cauterised and awed. Bis secures a clearer focus than that wrung from the few earlier recordings.

The solo viola Fantaisie (a recording premiere) is a workbench ‘fragment’ from almost forty years earlier. It has moments of display but ends in a quiet piacevole blessing.

In the Viola Concerto (in six tracks) the music often carries the sense of an avalanche of an idea being swept downhill while elements, including the soloist, aspire upwards. The music is keenly, almost manically, passionate and has a profile constantly in motion. Ellen Nisbeth gives every appearance of not merely knowing the notes but having a grip on the shifting emotional landscape.

The Concerto is allowed to communicate as a sort of imperious, emotional satnav rather than fumbling its way forwards.  I have heard the concerto in Bis’s earlier version from Nobuko Imai and also by Yuri Bashmet in a tape of what I take to be the premiere. What we hear here is a work of 27:21 running time.

Per-Henning Olsson’s booklet note expatiates on indicators why the concerto may not be a finished work. I will grant that it ends unresolved on a cliff edge. Even so, it works for me at an emotional level and we must be thankful that its tumbling and twisting activity, more often in flight than in repose, can speak to listeners. It enjoys parity of status with two other Pettersson concertos: the Violin Concerto No 2 (1978) and Symphony No 16 (aka Saxophone Concerto) (1979). Both have already been recorded in BIS’s Lindberg project.

In this disc, here are two densely restless works from the latter quarter of the last century. Each is suffused with passion and seriousness of purpose with an intermittent stratum of Pettersson’s accustomed gloom.

Rob Barnett

Reviews of previous Pettersson/Lindberg releases on BIS
Symphonies Nos 1 and 2  CD-1860
Symphonies Nos 4 and 16 CD-2110
Symphony No 6, CD-1980
Symphony No 9, CD-2038
Symphony No 13 CD-2190
Symphony No 17 and Violin Concerto No 2, CD-2290
Concertos Nos 1 and 2 for string orchestra CD-1690
Concerto No 3 for string orchestra CD-1590