Alfvén is yet
another of the many splendid 20th
Century composers whose music has become
hamstrung by a widening paradox: never
before has it been easier to acquire
first-rate recordings of so much of
his oeuvre (this new Naxos cycle of
the symphonies being a case in point),
yet for those who come to love his music
through those recordings, the
prospects of hearing an Alfvén
composition "live" have never
been bleaker. Despite their accessibility
and melodic warmth, Alfvén’s
symphonies have never seemed to "take"
outside of Scandinavia, even back during
the Koussevitzky/ Stokowski/ Beecham
era, when the music-loving public embraced
(or at least tolerated) a broader repertoire
than is now the case.
Alfvén’s "Greatest
Hit", of course, was the delectable
Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 ("Midsummer
Vigil"), one of those rare pieces
that’s almost impossible not to like.
But most contemporary music directors
(for reasons I cannot fathom, beyond
their understandable wish to remain
gainfully employed) have generally stopped
programming tone poems, suites, rhapsodies,
Strauss waltzes, or any other form of
"short" orchestral fare that
might inconvenience the board members
who’d be perfectly content for every
concert to follow the overture-concerto-symphony
template, Midsommarvarka has
virtually disappeared too. Perhaps if
Alfvén had a superstar-conductor
to "champion" his works in
America and the U.K. (the way Beecham
and Koussevitzky championed Sibelius),
Nah, that won’t work either; first of
all, there aren’t any conductors
with the sort of charisma Beecham and
Koussevitzky had, and secondly – as
much as I enjoy most of his music, Alfvén
just isn’t quite in the same league
as his Finnish near-contemporary; Sibelius
was seven years the senior.
In the strange and
haunting Fourth Symphony, though, Alfvén
creates a uniquely personal sound-world
that elevates him, temporarily, to the
first rank of Late Romantics. In the
Fourth, as in no other of his symphonies,
Alfvén combines his customary
skill at evoking landscape-moods with
a very sustained paean to human sensuality
(well, okay, is was really sexuality
but Alfvén didn’t "go there"
as explicitly in his music as he did
in his autobiography; now if Strindberg
had been a composer…!). Although Alfvén
rather disingenuously told the press
that his new symphony was "about"
the love of parent for child, and dedicated
the premier to his adolescent daughter,
Margita, the wordless soprano/tenor
vocalise that twines in and out and
round about the lush, at times even
throbbing, orchestral sonorities made
it perfectly clear to most listeners
and critics, during the first performance
on 4 November, 1919, that the composer
had grown-up ardor on his mind, rather
than parental affection. Well, one certainly
hopes so, at any rate….
Hearing the score today,
especially in relation to such earthy
and unequivocal contemporaneous works
as Le Sacre and Daphnis
, Alfvén’s idealized sirens’
song seems quite chaste and decorous;
it requires of us quite a stretch
of the societal imagination to understand
what so exercised the disdainful critics
and clucking prudes that castigated
the work after its Stockholm premier;
describing it as "immoral".
Within days of the first performance,
the work had already been tagged "The
Erotica Symphony"! (Now there’s
an Ingmar Bergman film just waiting
to be made!)
Oh, yes, the "Skerries"
part of it – that’s the Stockholmers’
name for the Aaland Islands, an exquisite
necklace of 6,654 small, rocky, often
forested islands that more or less connects
Finland with Sweden across the mouth
of the Gulf of Bothnia. Although I understand
from a Finnish friend that great care’s
being taken to keep the area from becoming
too commercialized, back in Alfvén’s
day the archipelago was truly wild and
free -- sparsely inhabited, teeming
with wildlife, and a paradise for anyone
seeking solitude. It was on one of those
islets, from November, 1918 to March,
1919, that Alfvén composed his
fourth symphony, a period he likened
to "an endless happy dream."
And so, too, the music
– although like all poetic love stories,
the one alluded to in this lush, surging
score, has its melancholy moments and
ends with the inevitable sadness of
parting, the Fourth could hardly
be described as "gloomy".
There is, to be sure, one storm-at-sea
episode, but for the most part Alfvén
paints a tone-portrait of his beloved
islands as they look under a blue-vaulted
Baltic sky during the brief intense
summer.
Alfvén cast
the 48-minute work in a single flowing
movement, clearly divided into four
"episodes". The first part,
a nocturne, he described as being a
portrait in sound of a young man’s "burning,
agonizing desire" for…well, a young
woman, whose reciprocal emotions are,
by contrast, "gentle and dreamy"
[since Alfvén admitted that his
inspiration was autobiographical, his
choice of adjectives alone tells us
there must be one hell of a subtext
underneath this rather pleasant music!];
the third episode – naturally -- boy
gets together with girl and, again quoting
Alfvén, "the highest bliss
of love is revealed to them". Of
course, it’s all downhill after that,
for the fourth and last episode trails
off into brooding sadness.
To my ears at least,
the Fourth has many beauties
and one serious weakness – it lacks
a single memorable and unifying melody
that Alfvén could perorate grandly
upon (major or minor), even though there
are a dozen places in the symphony when
it sounds like he’s working up to a
killer of a theme, it never quite emerges.
This is not to say that the extant themes
are without interest, or that he doesn’t
work them skillfully – I just keep expecting
a big, fat, purple, tumescent Tchaikovskian
TUNE to pull this sprawling piece together,
and I always get the feeling that Alfvén
kept hoping one would occur to him.
But never mind: it’s still a big-hearted,
emotionally generous, and frequently
gorgeous Late Romantic wallow.
This is the first of
Naxos’ new Alfvén-by-the-Icelanders-and-others
cycle I’ve managed to hear and I was
generally more than pleased with the
care, affection, and sense of detail
shown by Maestro Willén. Certainly,
at their modest retail price, these
Naxos versions should win many new friends
for Alfvén’s music. I have not
heard the new BIS recording, but it’ll
have to be the bee’s-knees to be worth
the price differential. I’m less happy
with the vocalists than with the orchestra
– either their mike placement was slightly
off or they were both recovering from
sore throats or something, but
too often they produced a chill, rather
glassy tone, when rapture is what this
music needs; of the two, I was decidedly
less pleased by Mr. Valdimarsson, who
sometimes sounds more like a man in
pain than a man in love.
If you’re a newcomer
to Alfvén’s symphonies, however,
and you’ve taken the plunge via Naxos
and you like what you hear, do
seek out at least one of the two classic
Swedish recordings. There is a wonderfully
idiomatic but slightly faded-sounding
version led by Nils Grevillius (who
knew the composer well) on Swedish Society
Discofil made in 1962 (SLT33186) only
on LP. His orchestra was the Stockholm
Philharmonic and the soloists were Gunilla
ap Malmborg and Sven Vikstrom. Then
again there is the rapt, trance-like
interpretation given by the redoubtable
Stig Westerberg and the Stockholm Philharmonic
on a Bluebell label CD – Elisabeth Söderström’s
incomparable realization of the female
vocalise would melt a glacier.
The "filler"
piece on this disc, the 1944 Festival
Overture, is a generic piece for
a generic occasion unfortunately the
program notes don’t tell us what that
occasion was, but the Swedes have a
big thing about commissioning one composer
or another to write a pomp-filled crowd-pleaser
every time the Mayor of Stockholm has
a ribbon-cutting ceremony – this one
might well have been for the Grand Opening
of Municipal Waste Treatment Plant No.
Six, or, from the sound of it, it could
just as well be subtitled "Entrance
of the Nobel Prize Committee for the
Prime Minister’s Bi-Weekly Poker Game
and Beer-Bust".
I thought it was a
gas – Alfvén must have picked
up a hefty fee for this pot-boiler,
because it sounds like he had fun writing
it. Imagine the Academic Festival Overture
as it might have sounded if Brahms was
chugging a case of Carlsberg every afternoon
for the week or so it took to compose
the piece: a good-natured mixture of
bombast and boozy conviviality, with
several high-stepping folk-tunes thrown
into a blender and orchestrated with
lots of flare and cleverness. It definitely
"sounds Swedish", if you know
what I mean, but it’s so much fun that
any audience, anywhere, would find it
hard to resist. Willén and his
players turn in a rollicking performance
and I would guess it’s safe to say that
they beat the competition hands-down…if
there is any. At any rate, ten minutes
of boisterous crowd-pleasing musical
fun makes a nice chaser after the High
Seriousness of the symphony.
William R. Trotter
Arnis Halla, soprano; Johann Valdimarsson, tenor
