Wilhelm Stenhammar 1871–1927 Compact Disc 1
6 76’52
Peter Mattei baritone Malmö Symfoniorkester / Paavo Järvi
Symphony No.1 in F 1 2 3 4
I. II. III. IV.
Tempo molto tranquillo – Allegro Andante con moto Allegro amabile Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco – Tranquillo
17’06 10’33 9’37 15’17
Two Sentimental Romances Op.28 for violin and orchestra 7 8
I. Elegy (Introduction to Act I): Lento II. Intermezzo: Allegro agitato III. Karneval: Tempo di valse moderato – Tempo di marcia vivace
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Interlude from the cantata The Song Op.44: Molto adagio, solenne
No.1 in A: Andantino No.2 in F minor: Allegro patetico
6’20 6’11
Ulf Wallin violin Malmö Symfoniorkester / Paavo Järvi
Lodolezzi Sings – Suite Op.39 5 6 7
Florez and Blanzeflor: Andante sostenuto – Andante moderato – Andante sostenuto 8’19 Ballad for baritone and orchestra (Text: Oscar Levertin)
3’17 4’07 10’13
Compact Disc 3
75’34
Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor Op.1 4’14
Göteborgs Symfoniker / Neeme Järvi Compact Disc 2
78’12
1 2 3 4
Symphony No.2 in G minor Op.34 1 2 3 4
I. II. III. IV.
Allegro energico Andante Scherzo: Allegro, ma non troppo presto Finale: Sostenuto – Allegro vivace
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Midwinter Op.24 (Text: O Blessed Day): Molto sostenuto – Allegro Göteborgs Konserthuskör (5) chorus master Ove Gotting Göteborgs Symfoniker / Neeme Järvi
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11’02 9’02 7’13 14’18 12’25
Original version (Hainauer, ed. Dr. Allan B. Ho) I. Molto moderato e maestoso II. Vivacissimo III. Andante IV. Allegro commodo
15’25 4’43 11’27 13’51
Love Derwinger piano Malmö Symfoniorkester / Paavo Järvi
Piano Concerto No.2 in D minor Op.23 5 6 7 8
I. II. III. IV.
Introduzione Scherzo Adagio Finale
9’28 6’42 5’50 7’16
Cristina Ortiz piano Göteborgs Symfoniker / Neeme Järvi
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Wilhelm Stenhammar The leading Swedish musical personality of his time – as composer, pianist and conductor – Wilhelm Stenhammar was born in Stockholm and raised in a strictly religious but very musical home environment. He started composing as a small child: his first teacher was his father, Per Ulrik Stenhammar, an architect who was also a composer, but who died when his son was only four years old. From 1887 Stenhammar studied at the Royal Conservatoire in Stockholm, taking piano with Richard Andersson (a pupil of Clara Schumann), organ with Wilhelm Heinze and harmony and counterpoint with Emil Sjögren and others, though he regarded himself as largely self-taught in composition. He was organist at the French Reformed Church in Stockholm from 1890–92 and then went to Berlin, where he studied for a year with the pianist Karl Barth. He made a striking pianistic debut in the Swedish premiere of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto in 1892, and an equally impressive one as a composer the following year with the Stockholm premiere of his own First Concerto. Stenhammar then pursued a career as a pianist, accompanist and chamber-music player. From 1897 to 1906 he was successively conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Stockholm, the Royal Theatre, and the New Philharmonic Society. He then took a year out to pursue compositional study in Italy, living in Florence and then returning to Sweden in 1907 as conductor of the Gothenburg Orchestral Association, creating Sweden’s first truly professional orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony. He persistently championed contemporary Scandinavian music and premiered many new works. In 1909 he was also for a while director of music at Uppsala University. In his early years Stenhammar was much influenced by the German Romantic composers, especially Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner. Later, encouraged by the examples of Sibelius and Nielsen, he strove for a more specifically Scandinavian form of expression. Though in his own music he focused at first on works for the piano, from the early years of the 20th century he concentrated more on chamber, vocal and orchestral compositions. By the early 1920s his health began to deteriorate; due to a series of strokes he retired from his conducting post in Gothenburg in 1922, and though he continued to tour as a performer and was director of music for Stockholm Opera 1923–25 he found it increasingly difficult to go on composing. He died of a brain haemorrhage, aged 56.
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The work that made Stenhammar’s reputation in the 1890s was his huge Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor Op.1. Its Stockholm premiere in 1893, with the composer as soloist, confirmed him at a stroke as one of Sweden’s leading talents. He went on to perform it in Copenhagen, then in Berlin under Richard Strauss, in Munich, in Manchester under Hans Richter; it was even heard in the USA. No previous Swedish composition had ever attracted such widespread international attention. Nevertheless, in a decade or so the Concerto was forgotten; the self-critical Stenhammar grew embarrassed by its derivativeness and ceased to play it. The full score was long believed lost, until a copy turned up in the USA as recently as 1990. We tend to associate genius with originality, and the Concerto is an early and deeply derivative work: yet it’s also a masterpiece, albeit a minor one. Tchaikovsky and Schumann are clear influences, along with uncanny prefigurings of both Rachmaninov and Elgar, but the presiding example is Brahms. Only a year before, the 20-year-old Stenhammar had given the Swedish premiere of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, and his own First Concerto is full of passages that are blatantly, or subtly, inspired by Brahms’s. Its overall four-movement shape, though, stems from Brahms’s Second Concerto, with a witty scherzo coming second and a vigorous, ardent finale longer than either of Brahms’s. And the motivic cell announced in the work’s first bar – two sforzando chords and a silence – is a near-crib from the start of Brahms’s Tragic Overture that Stenhammar uses brilliantly as a generator of events and structural marker. All these ‘second-hand’ ideas, like the strongly Wagnerian ones in the operas he wrote a few years later, are deployed in the service of an argument that is wholly Stenhammar’s, and pursued with ingenuity, superb technique and ardent conviction. But in the lyric pastoral melody that enters sweetly on the woodwind and strings halfway through the grand finale, and dominates proceedings thereafter up to the noble ending, we hear Stenhammar’s own voice – for it comes from one of his finest early songs, ‘Leaning on the Fence’ (an elegiac song of young love cut off by death), a setting of the great Swedish poet J.L. Runeberg. Stenhammar’s other piano concerto, Piano Concerto No.2 in D minor Op.23, is a very different matter. Completed after three years’ work in 1907, this is a fully mature utterance, comparable to Rachmaninov’s contemporary concertos, and also a terser one, lasting little more than half the duration of the First. Though it too has four movements, with the scherzo coming second, the internal structure is very different. All the movements play without a break, giving the impression of
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a single span of music. They also have an improvisatory character, as if in search of a stability – of theme, of tonality – that is only attained in the slow third movement. That movement’s key of C sharp minor effects a gravitational pull against the D minor tonality of the concerto as a whole, and this is felt from the opening bars of the rhapsodic first movement, which falls into three main sections and whose opening piano chords and recitative-like writing plunge us into a highly romantic sound-world with roots in Chopin and Beethoven. The answering orchestral tutti, Allegro molto energico, has a much more contemporary sound, and piano and orchestra alternate in a passionate, dark-hued, exploratory dialogue, never wholly able to agree on the key, the soloist advocating D, the orchestra C sharp. A pell-mell scherzo follows, a bravura demonstration of velocity in playing and in musical thinking, but still equivocal over the identity of the principal key. The orchestra briefly falls silent for a more meditative trio section, begun by the piano in an almost Brahmsian vein that is soon twisted by individual chromaticism, bringing back the darker colours of the first movement. After a compressed reprise of the fast music, this trio theme leads into the Adagio slow movement. Here the piano takes the lead with a profound and song-like meditation using full chords and rolling arpeggio writing to expand and enhance the thoughtful and heartfelt melodic line. The orchestra supports in suitably solemn vein, and then a brilliant linking passage sweeps into the D major finale, which displays a surging and confident main theme. This concluding movement ties together the thematic threads of the concerto in a masterful manner and whips up the excitement to a coda of playful bravura. Stenhammar completed only two symphonies, though there is a fragment of an unfinished Third (1918–19). The imposing, large-scale Symphony No.1 in F was composed in 1902–3 and received only a single performance in Stenhammar’s lifetime, in Stockholm in December 1903. A further performance, by the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester under Hans Richter, was planned, but Stenhammar withdrew the work, castigating it as ‘too Brucknerian’, and did not assign it an opus number: it was only revived long after his death. It has been speculated that it was the experience of hearing Sibelius’s Second Symphony in the autumn of 1903 – a work with an entirely original and authentic ‘Scandinavian’ character – that motivated Stenhammar’s rejection of his own symphony, which immediately seemed to him merely derivative. Though he intended revising the work, he never got round to it, and it was only long after his death that it was revived and found to contain music of sterling worth.
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Certainly many features of the work are redolent especially of Wagner, Brahms and Bruckner, but Stenhammar’s own personality as it started to emerge in Florez och Blanzeflor and the First Piano Concerto is certainly apparent. A point of interest at once is the way he uses the horns to etch many of the melodic lines, starting from the very first bars of the Molto tranquillo introductory section of the first movement. The horn theme is followed by a poignant string phrase that will become important in the finale of the Symphony. The bulk of the movement, after the serenely contemplative introduction has run its course, is a powerful and finely worked out sonata-form Allegro that, after its final climax, subsides into a reflective coda based on the materials of the introduction. The Andante con moto second movement – of which Stenhammar thought well enough that he considered issuing it as an independent work – is a noble conception in a slow sonata design. The first theme has something of a slow-march character and a Classical, almost Beethovenian poise and depth of feeling, while the second theme is more lyrical and song-like: the Brucknerian echoes are particularly close in its continuation. There is also a tramping dotted-rhythm figure that helps to propel the movement onwards and drives it to its main climax. The ensuing scherzo is marked Allegro amabile and has, indeed, a ‘lovable’ character with its attractive and highly contrasting ideas, which again bring out the horns as quasi-soloists. A pair of clarinets introduces the slower, almost chant-like melody of the trio section, an idea of great beauty which Stenhammar invests with an atmosphere of pastoral contentment. In the final pages of the recurring scherzo this melody is most effectively combined with the scherzo music. The finale is a fiery and high-spirited sonata-form movement whose first subject is formed out of a quicker version of the themes of the first movement’s slow introduction. Martial fanfares make a transition to a smoother second subject that is equally apt for development and is, in fact, the focus of the development section. In the recapitulation the second subject is further developed before a majestic coda which may be Brucknerian in its antecedents but is still infused with genuine grandeur. Because Stenhammar suppressed the First Symphony, his Symphony No.2 in G minor was the only one he was satisfied with (the manuscript just calls it ‘Symphony in G minor’, as if denying the very existence of No.1). Begun while on holiday in Rome in 1911 it was crafted with characteristic care, occupying him for four years before it was completed in April 1915. Stenhammar dedicated it to the Gothenberg Orchestral Association, whom he conducted in the first performance.
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The work is one of his two orchestral masterpieces (the other is the symphony-sized Serenade in F), and deserves to be ranked along with the Sibelius and Nielsen symphonies: there are affinities with both of his great contemporaries, but Stenhammar’s voice remains distinct. This is a work of power and drama with strong, memorable themes and a compelling musical architecture. Though we might approximately characterize it as enshrining a kind of Nordic neo-Classicism, it has a great richness of emotional life. This seems to stem from a sustained attempt not to fall prey to the innate pathos of the G minor tonality (which finds classic expression in Mozart’s great G minor Symphony). Stenhammar’s themes often seem direct, plain-spoken, with a folk-like tinge, but the desire to be active and to rejoice is continually being undercut, not by any dramatic opposition or innately dark materials, but by instrumental and harmonic half-lights or shadows, side-slips into the minor mode, suggestions of sadness, regret or nostalgia. The first movement begins with a forthright, almost rustic unison theme which establishes at once the idea that we are setting out on a journey. A much more reflective, even melancholic idea provides the second subject. Evocative woodwind counterpoints and sudden bursts of brass fanfare establish both a somewhat pastoral atmosphere and a sense of Nordic twilight, but also heroic striving. The development section knits all the various figures and motifs into a splendidly purposeful onward motion, which unexpectedly dissipates – and then bird-like calls in the woodwind, beginning with a bucolic bassoon, prepare the way for the climactic moment of recapitulation and an expansive coda. Beginning with a grave, chant-like string figure that gives birth to a profoundly lyrical main melody, the Andante maintains the somewhat pastoral atmosphere of first movement but becomes more troubled as it proceeds, building like a processional to an impassioned climax before coming to a peaceful close. The innate nobility of this music may make us think of Elgar. The high-spirited scherzo is delightful dance-music in the vein of Stenhammar’s great orchestral Serenade, but it also has a determined edge. A flurry of pastoral woodwind brings it up short, however, and the music lapses into a kind of reverie, delightful in its own way but with more than a touch of sadness. Almost it seems to lose its way, but just when it appears to have come to a standstill Stenhammar whips up the energy again and the waltz resumes. The finale is the longest and most complex movement, and the one in which all Stenhammar’s hard-won contrapuntal skills are on display. An impressive, rhapsodic Sostenuto introduction establishes an almost epic atmosphere (the parallels with Sibelius are close here), and then the main
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Allegro begins with a busy, humorously loquacious theme that turns out, despite its length, to be the subject of a buoyant, cheerful fugue. All is bustle and brightness until the fugue suddenly stops short, and a second fugue begins, slow and tranquil in the woodwind, based on the theme of the opening Sostenuto. When this comes to a peaceful close, the same theme becomes a stealthy pizzicato string figure, over which fragments of the first fugue theme reappear in the woodwind. Gradually Stenhammar works up a grandiose, many-sectioned double fugue on both themes. During its course the garrulous Allegro theme appears utterly transformed into a noble, long-limbed melody of great romantic feeling. It is the apotheosis of this form of the theme, treated as a heroic brass chorale that eventually crowns the symphony in triumph. Even before the First Piano Concerto, Stenhammar had begun to attract notice as a composer of songs, and one of his earliest successes was the setting for voice and orchestra of the ballad Florez och Blanzeflor (Florez and Blanzeflor) by the Swedish poet Oscar Levertin, to whose verse Stenhammar was particularly attached. Completed in 1891, it opens with delicate woodwind patterns that lead into the strong, forthright melody with which the soloist sings the first verse. Over the next three verses, as the poem speaks of the youth, wedding, reign and eventual death of the king and queen, the music gains in intensity and expressive depth. Finally it returns to the pastoral mood of the opening, reflecting on the return of Spring and its promise of the renewal of life. In the rhapsody Midvinter (Midwinter) Stenhammar stakes out his claim to a folk-inspired territory that his contemporary Hugo Alfvén was exploring in his popular Swedish Rhapsodies. Stenhammar’s work was composed in 1907, in Italy, in decidedly warmer climes than the Swedish winter. In a note on the score he explained that the music is largely based on an old traditional dance-tune that he had learned from a musician in Mora, one of the towns of Dalarne province in central Sweden, and on a well-known hymn, ‘Den signade Dag’ (The Holy Day), sung every Christmas morning in the church in Mora. Stenhammar scored Midvinter for chorus and orchestra, but all that the chorus has to do is to sing the hymn in long notes, like a chorale, in the centre of the piece, and as a result he sanctioned performances for orchestra alone, as the choir’s part is in any case doubled by instruments. Starting with an evocative molto sostenuto that gives way to an ebullient Allegro, this is a delightful work, notable for its lively contrapuntal combinations of dance-melodies, its colourful scoring and its joyous mood despite the wintry tang and frosty bite he gives to some of its episodes.
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The Two Sentimental Romances for violin and orchestra (there are also versions for violin and piano and for flute and orchestra) were composed in the summer of 1910. Stenhammar intended the epithet ‘sentimental’ in the sense more familiar to his own time than to ours: infused with strong feeling or emotional idealism (not, as the more recent meaning of the word has it, mawkish or over-indulgent). He may well have had Beethoven’s two Romances for violin and orchestra in mind as a model. He does not give the violin soloist much to do in the matter of bravura display, but the pieces are a fine test of innate musicality and refined playing. The first piece, an Andantino in A major, has an uncloying sweetness, whereas the second, an F minor movement marked Allegro patetico, is much more passionate and full of bittersweet lyricism. Stenhammar composed several distinguished theatre scores, one of which was his music to Lodolezzi Sjunger (Lodolezzi Sings), a romantic comedy written in 1918 by the prominent Swedish dramatist Hjalmar Bergman (1883–1931). Stenhammar’s score dates from the following year, 1919, and he subsequently extracted from it a three-movement suite for string orchestra with harp and mandolin. This is like a miniature serenade, very much in the style of his much bigger orchestral Serenade in F with hints of the music of the Baroque era. Stenhammar’s last major work was his large-scale cantata Sången (The Song), for soloists, chorus and orchestra, completed in 1921. Its synthesis of post-Wagnerian harmony with a firm and architectural polyphonic style that derived ultimately from Handel was, to many listeners, a surprising one, though both these elements were very close to Stenhammar’s personal view of his music. The cantata received mixed reviews, and is seldom performed complete even today. However the purely orchestral Mellanspiel (Interlude) with which Stenhammar linked the two principal parts of the work soon found an independent existence as a concert item in its own right, and remains as a shining example of the composer’s most personal mode of utterance. Lower strings and woodwind begin it; the music ascends in serene counterpoint, irradiated by some of Stenhammar’s most subtle scoring. Towards the middle of the piece a noble brass chorale is heard, moving majestically to a grand but ever-calm climax, from which the music subsides to a peaceful conclusion suggesting complete fulfilment. C Malcolm MacDonald, 2011
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Symphonies: Live recording: 24 September 1982 (No.1), 16 September 1983 (No.2), Gothenburg Concert Hall, Sweden Producer: Lennart Dehn · Recording engineer: Michael Bergek Piano Concertos: Recording: June 1992, Malmo Concert Hall (No.1), May 1989, Gothenburg Concert Hall, Sweden (No.2) INSTRUMENTARIUM Two Sentimental Romances – Violin: J.B. Guadagnini 1745; Bow: Sartory Piano Concerto No.1 – Grand Piano: Steinway D. Piano technician: Leif Sammuelsson Piano Concerto No.2 – Grand Piano: Steinway D. Producer: Lennart Dehn · Recording engineer: Michael Bergek Cover image: Penguins in an Arctic Landscape at Dusk by Herman Herzog Photo: Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library C 2011 Brilliant Classics
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