Kurt Atterberg - Symphonies (Ari Rasilainen)

Information

Composer: Kurt Atterberg

• CD1: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 4
• CD2: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5
• CD3: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 6
• CD4: Symphonies Nos. 7 & 8
• CD5: Symphony No. 9; Symphonic Poem 'The River'

Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra

NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra

Ari Rasilainen, conductor

Date: 1998–2003

Label: CPO

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Review

Pay-off time for those who were prepared to ‘play the long game’ and wait for this boxed set to appear. CPO issued these five discs individually at full price between 2000 and 2003. Now they appear as a bargain set first on the shelves only a month after the thirtieth anniversary of Atterberg’s death.

Atterberg, a Swedish composer, is the very model of the late-romantic Scandinavian. Writing from the perspective of 1974, John H. Yoell in his book ‘The Nordic Sound’ (Crescendo Press, 1974) said that Atterberg was "listed among the casualties buried beneath the avalanche of non-tonal music engulfing the world since 1950. But tides of fad and fashion ... did not erase what Atterberg managed to accomplish nor quench his impulse to keep working at an age when most men sit rocking on the porch." Indeed Atterberg had to contend with another burden: that of spending a goodly part of his very long life watching the musical world reject his lovingly crafted lyrical works on the waxing moon of dodecaphony.

Atterberg’s winning and even compelling ways show him to be an adept of orchestral colour and seething incident. His scores are of the romantic-folk-impressionist type. Yoell considered him the equal of Stenhammar and a cut above Alfvén and Rangström. Personally I would place him above Stenhammar alongside a Swedish symphonist not mentioned by Yoell but also celebrated by CPO (and Sterling!), Wilhelm Peterson-Berger.

...

Atterberg's symphonies on record have, until CPO and Ari Rasilainen set about them, been patch-worked across labels. No. 2 on Swedish Society Discofil. No. 3 on Caprice (still a very fine recording by the way). Nos. 1 and 4 on Sterling. No. 6 is multiply recorded on dell'Arte, Koch and most accessibly on Bis. Numbers 7 Romantica and 8 are also on Sterling. We should remind ourselves that the CPO cycle while premiering on record only the Ninth presents in most cases only the second CD appearances of all these works and the first in full digital format (excepting only 3, 6, 7, 8).

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This is the first cycle on one label, by one conductor but with orchestral service divided between two orchestras: Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt, Radio-Philharmonie Hannover des NDR, SWR Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart.

Rasilainen inspires his orchestras to readings of great intensity and poetry. If you read some of the Atterberg literature you might easily misread these symphonies as pictorial, shallow, technically accomplished but without depth and far too reliant on borrowed folk tunes rather than his own inspiration. Both in hearing these readings and the preparation I made in advance by listening to the other recordings of the first eight symphonies I have no doubt that Atterberg has every right to stand with such symphonists as Bax, Ropartz (whose five are rumoured already to be ‘in the can’), Moeran, Stenhammar and Louis Glass. He is a supremely imaginative virtuoso writer for the orchestra and his sense of symphonic trajectory, mood and scenario matches his extraordinary technical gifts. His inspirations are of the finest quality and if he relies on folk material it is adeptly resolved into the symphonic fabric rather than seeming to be grafted on.

...

For now we should focus on having such a sympathetically recorded and magnificently conducted cycle at our finger tips in return for what amounts to Naxos price for the five discs. To enthusiasts who in the 1970s and 1980s moved heaven and earth, bank balances and tape machines to get to hear the full cycle this box represents riches unimaginable.

— Rob Barnett

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Kurt Atterberg (12 December 1887 – 15 February 1974) was a Swedish composer and civil engineer. Born in Gothenburg, he studied composition at the Stockholm Conservatory and earned an engineering degree from the Royal Institute of Technology. Atterberg composed nine symphonies, six concertante works, five operas, and two ballets, all in a late Romantic style. In addition to composing, he also served also as a conductor, critic and administrator. After the end of World War II, Atterberg was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, which resulted in him being isolated and ignored by younger composers and writers.

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Ari Rasilainen (born 18 February 1959 in Helsinki) is a Finnish conductor. He studied conducting with Jorma Panula at the Sibelius Academy and with Arvid Jansons in Berlin. He also studied violin in Berlin with Aleksander Labko, then played as a violinist in the Finnish Radio Symphony and the Helsinki Philharmonic. As a conductor, Rasilainen was Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutschen Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz from 2002 to 2009. He has also worked as a guest conductor with several German radio symphony orchestras. Rasilainen has been teaching at the University of Music in Würzburg since 2011.

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