Atterberg: Suite No. 3, Op. 19 No. 1 for violin, viola and string orchestra

Back in 2010, Neeme Järvi commenced his Scandinavian project with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, offering up idiomatic performances of orchestral works by two of Norway’s best-loved composers, Johan Halvorsen and Johan Svendsen. Similar in its approach, this new survey turns to Norway’s neighbouring country, with Järvi conducting the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in orchestral works by the Swedish composer, Kurt Atterberg.

Atterberg was one of Sweden’s leading composers of the twentieth century, not to mention a conductor, critic, and founder of The Society of Swedish Composers. Largely self-taught, he developed a compositional style which initially owed much to Brahms and Alfvén, although he was more inclined to paint vivid, loosely structured melodic pictures than to adhere to the traditional classical frameworks. Tuneful, accessible, and fairly folkloristic too, Atterberg’s music became more impressionistic by World War I, and it was around this time that he composed most of the works on this disc.

Symphony No. 4 (1918) was composed in friendly competition with a Swedish colleague, Natanael Berg. They had decided that each should compose a work lasting no longer than twenty minutes, and that a bass tuba should be heard in ‘splendid isolation’ somewhere in it. The resulting piece by Atterberg is full of humour and wit, the language open and simple, and strongly inspired by Swedish folk music.

That same year, Atterberg was asked to write music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Sœur Béatrice. For the theatre performance itself, he only had three musicians at his disposal, playing violin, viola, and harmonium. A few years later, however, he reworked the harmonium part of extracts from the incidental music for string orchestra, retaining the solo violin and viola, after which this became known at Suite No. 3, a work filled with beauty and passion, and ultimately one of his most frequently performed pieces.

For many years, the only work by Atterberg that circulated widely outside Sweden, in performance, recording, and notoriety, was his Symphony No. 6, for which in 1928 he won a prize awarded by the Columbia Gramophone Company for a work in the spirit of Schubert, who had died 100 years earlier.

En värmlandsrapsodi (1933) was written to mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the 1909 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Selma Lagerlöf, and it was performed for the first time in a live broadcast by Swedish Radio. Upon hearing the piece, Lagerlöf wrote to Atterberg: ‘It was a solemn moment when we heard the rhapsody streaming from the radio. We listened with great joy and excitement and were made happy by the echo of melodies from Värmland. May the piece live and win the people’s ear.’

The album ‘Nordic Spring’ is a collection of some of the finest works for string orchestra by composers from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The music includes popular pieces by Grieg, Nielsen, Svendsen, Sibelius and Atterberg, as well as Edvard Bræin’s highly melodic Serenade for viola and orchestra, here receiving its world premiere recording. Violinist Terje Tønnesen directs the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and is also a soloist in two pieces, as is the distinguished viola player, Lars Anders Tomter.

Since its formation in 1977 the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra has established itself as one of the foremost chamber orchestras on the international scene. The NCO is comprised of Norway’s finest instrumentalists and its artistic directors and leaders throughout its history have included Iona Brown, Leif Ove Andsnes, Isabelle van Keulen and, more recently, Terje Tønnesen.

‘Nordic Spring’ features some of the best examples of string music from the Scandinavian region. One of the most famous works in the genre, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, is followed by Kurt Atterberg’s Suite for violin, viola and string orchestra, a piece notable for its transcendent beauty and passion. The soloists here are Lars Anders Tomter and Terje Tønnesen, who also performs the violin part in Svendsen’s charming Romance, Op 26. The set also includes Nielsen’s first published work the Little Suite in A minor and Sibelius´ Valse triste, as well as the world premiere recording of Serenade for viola and orchestra by the Norwegian composer Edvard Bræin (1887-1957) with Lars Anders Tomter as soloist.

There was a particularly rich vein of Nordic writing for the violin between the years 1910 and 1930. In this recital Henning Kraggerud, an exemplary stylist lauded for his Sibelius and Sinding concerto disc, Naxos 8557266 (CD) and 6110056 (SACD) (‘Kraggerud’s performance is superb throughout’ – Classics Today.com), explores this memorable repertoire. It ranges from Halvorsen’s folk-flecked Norwegian Dance to Stenhammar’s passionate Sentimental Romances. Late romanticism floods Sinding’s Abendstimmung whilst Sibelius’s Six Humoresques remain a masterpiece of the genre. The earlier works of Ole Bull illustrate the brilliance and panache of ‘The Nordic Paganini’.