Customer Reviews

Rosenberg: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 6

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Why does Hilding Rosenberg's third symphony languish in obscurity whilst lesser works receive countless performances? This is a masterpiece, unmarred by a single superfluous bar, which contains some of the most moving music I have ever heard. Rosenberg's music betrays a first-rate intellect in full command of his material, achieving a fine balance between the tough contrapuntalism of the first subject and the tender poetry of the second.

The sixth symphony does not scale the emotional heights of the third, but is well-argued and thoroughly enjoyable.

This is a first-rate performance which has aged well, but it's high time that we were given a new cycle of Rosenberg's symphonies.

Norway has long been able to boast of Edvard Grieg and Denmark of Carl Nielsen. Sweden, although home to a robust musical life since the 17th century, cannot point to a single, high-profile composer with a broad reputation outside her borders. Occasionally, a reminder will appear that Jean Sibelius came from Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and so qualifies culturally as a Swede, but that constitutes only the most tenuous of claims. Despite their publicity gap, however, the Swedes have produced more than their share of first-rate composers, especially in the 20th century, and of these no doubt the most accomplished was Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985), born in Bosjökloster in the southern province of Skåne. The first genuine modernist among Swedish music-makers, Rosenberg's earliest works showed his awareness of Schoenberg's experimental style. An early Violin Concerto (1924) and the "Sinfonia Grave" (No. 2, 1935) express themselves in a thorny and heavily chromatic style and make use, in a rather unassimilated way, of twelve-note themes. How to characterize Rosenberg when he finds his own voice in the mid- and late-1930s? He shares much in common with Hindemith: A love of dense counterpoint, a taste for chromatically thickened but fundamentally triadic resolutions, adherence to formal procedures on baroque models. But Rosenberg differs from Hindemith in operating on a larger scale and, finally, in his greater reluctance to discard an essential, Romantic outlook. This is the Rosenberg we hear on the present CD. The Third Symphony (1939) offers a case in point. Inspired by Romain Rolland's "Jean Christophe" (1904-1912), and called "De fyra tidsalder" ("The Four Ages [of Man]"), its four substantial movements need about forty minutes in performance. Rosenberg builds the atmospheric First Movement around a theme, first discovered in the cellos, that utilizes all twelve notes of the chromatic octave; he does not treat this theme in dodecaphonic fashion, however, but uses it within a tonal framework. The other movements are a nocturne, an energetic scherzo, and a tumultuous finale at the conclusion of which the twelve-note theme returns. The Sixth Symphony ("Sinfonia Semplice," 1951) illustrates Rosenberg's affiliation with the so-called metamorphosis-principle that guided so many Scandinavian composers after World War II. Shorter than the Third and in four sections played without pause, it proves in the end to have been a sequence of variations upon, or developments of, Luther's hymn "Ein Feste Burg." (It thus anticipates Vagn Holmboe's Tenth Symphony [1971], which, in similarly stealthy fashion, builds itself out of the "Dies Irae.") Rosenberg composed prolifically and also conducted regularly. We hear him in Swedish Radio recordings leading the orchestra in his own work. Serious collectors of 20th century music need to know something about Rosenberg.