Allan Pettersson - Symphony No.2; Symphonic Movement

Allan PETTERSSON (1911-1980) 

Symphonic Movement (1973)

Symphony no 2 (1953) 

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Alun Francis

Pettersson was a modern romantic. Romantic in that the music conveys an interior and very personal world. One senses a psychological pilgrimage or passage of arms. As a romantic his music is not to be compared for example with that of Atterburg. There is no pastoral relaxation, no folk influence and no flicker of humour unless it is the skull’s vacant leer. He has some superficial kinship with Fartein Valen and Harald Saeverud. He is ‘modern’ in that the music exploits dissonance when it serves the composer’s purpose. There is no systematic adherence to serial technique or 12-tone dogma. It is instead fraught with anxiety - tense, distraught, turbulent, drained of relief, buffeted, grievously wounded, tortured by outrageous fortune, excoriating but singing with hard-won hope. This pessimism is in line with the Nordic stereotype – or caricature - but its redemptive power and the reason why people are drawn back to these scores is the composer’s ability to draw a tearful serene epiphany out of exhaustion and a battered spirit. This speaks to the experience of many in the last century though Pettersson’s suffering arose from his paralysing illness, his meagre family circumstances and the neglect of his music.

His way with small rhythmic motifs, repeated in a non-minimalist way is part of his sound autograph. These often are set off like little automata in a sort of ‘oompah’ habanera and then fade and fall. Similar DNA strands include the screaming and protesting strings and groaning and agonised brass. The lachrymose and fragile yet enduring blessing of a long-limbed Pettersson melody will be what has you going back to these scores. They are much stronger than the fashionable following they attracted in the 1970s and 1980s and this is your chance to find that out.

Will you take to him? First of all you have to hear him. I recommend that you persist with the Seventh Symphony which at 44:35 is by no means his longest. It ends in a high-whistling benediction of a melody that is haunting in its crushing emotional power. It is quite simply one of the largely unsung wonders of Western classical music. There is perhaps a little of Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs about that miraculously sustained finale. Then again you get some idea of the idiom by trying the ten minute Symphonic Movement on the first disc. However while you can hear the Pettersson manner, the substance and its emotional range mean that there is no substitute for experiencing a complete symphony. That has to be the Seventh – that’s the one that Antal Dorati recorded in the 1960s. That Dorati recording, still available on Swedish Society Discofil – carried Pettersson’s name far and wide and won new friends for him across the world. It remains the best version although Albrecht is very good.

The First Symphony was destroyed so the first viable one and the first to be recorded was the Second. It dates from his years studying with René Leibowitz in Paris. It is of about the same span as the Seventh and is also in his hallmark single movement format. Searing Tchaikovskian strings pass like wraiths from the Pathetique. They are dowsed in the acid rain of Bergian lyricism and the devastation and upheaval of the Fourth symphonies of Sibelius and Shostakovich. There is some balm in Gilead but here it does not flow like honey and when it comes it is brutally shrivelled. A sharp thrust from the trumpets ushers the work towards its close. CPO competes with the Swedish Society Discofil’s SCD 1012 – the 1966 analogue recording. Francis takes five minutes longer than Westerberg over the symphony yet neither seems unduly fast or unduly slow.