May 1, 2007

  • HB: Hugo Alfven

    Today marks the birthday of Swedish composer Hugo Alfven (1872-1960).  Alfven's music has slowly gained a wider audience through recordings.  Most of his symphonies are rarely heard in concert.  They tend toward a kind of thicker Romantic style that is essentially thematically based but also manages to occasionally drift into a more programmatic mode with wonderfully descriptive titles.  Alfven's most popular concert pieces, especially back in the 1950s and 1960s were his Swedish Rhapsodys. (The first of these was arranged as a solo guitar piece performed by Chet Atkins in a classic late-1950s recording.  Mantovanni and Arthur Fiedler also made popular recordings of the rhapsodies)  These somewhat conventional works, filled with gorgeous folkish melodies were a nice contrast to the many Americana folk pieces programmed during the time.  Their relatively short playing time also helped more orchestras program them once in a while.

    Like with any music one gets "discovers" mine came when I picked up a cassette copy of Alfven's fourth symphony, subtitled "From the Seaward Skerries."  This is an unabashedly romantic work with male and female solo vocal lines passionately calling to each other through a rich musical texture.  There are no words for them to sing and their impassioned musical lines are the sort of thing that may seem more quaint in a more cynical age.  Alfven's fourth symphony though is an engaging piece of music which is a great place to start if you want to get to know his music, or have some representation of it in your music library.

    Naxos has been releasing a great deal of Alfven's music on mid-price CDs.  Neeme Jarvi had a more expansive performance for the BIS label.  For me the fourth will always be compared to that first recording I heard which was conducted by Stig Westerberg and featured a gorgeous soprano vocalise by Elisabeth Soderstrom.