Review

Anders Eliassons fame is essentially regional, highlighted by an abundance of performances in his homeland of Sweden, relatively few elsewhere, and a rather slender discography for a composer just into his sixties. Yet those relative few who have taken the time to listen carefully have written glowingly of his work, and his recent disc of two large-scale orchestra works bears witness to a composer who clearly deserves a larger audience.

The Double Concerto gets right to business from bar one, opening with a scurry of dense activity that gives the impression that the listener dropped the needle by mistake in the middle of a scherzo or finale. The piano enters at the first climax, and the frenetic, crowded dialogue continues nearly uninterrupted for much of the first movement. The faintest hints of Prokofievs and Bartóks concertos can be discerned, and the syntax of other prominent composers is hinted at periodically, yet the language never sounds derivative or like an oblique homage. Both solo instruments appear to have equal standing, and there are brief sections in which the orchestra moves aside to let the protagonists go at it. The attacca into the central movement is stealthily achieved. It is a lyrical and often tender movement, but always shadowed by a sense of angst and foreboding. Near the end of the movement the texture thins and a less ambiguous Romanticism wins out. A violin cadenza links the final two movements. Violinist Ulf Wallin and pianist Roland Pöntinen are in top form, and their reading appears completely authoritative and tuned in with Eliassons sober sensibilities. Wallins cadenza is a highlight of the disc, a welcome lone voice from the bustle that pervades much of the concerto.

The Sinfonia for Strings is nominally in three movements, although they are connected by attacca transitions. Nearly 40 minutes of continuous string music filled with high tension and nearly unremitting angst make for a challenging but ultimately rewarding listening experience. The prevailing texture is a contrapuntal web, varying widely in density, dynamics, range, and dissonance, although legato is the overwhelmingly dominant articulation. Eliasson taps into all manner of 20th-century harmonic practice, but forgoes Bartók and Stravinskys view of strings as potentially percussive instruments, avoiding other sonic string possibilities in the process. There is tension and release in his carefully regulated and organic sense of dissonance and consonance, but in this work release is a relative experience. When textures thin, or dissonance dissolves, little sunlight is allowed in their place. But this singular vision in the face of the works extended dimensions has its own rewards for the patient music-lover, and leaves the listener satisfied, if emotionally spent.

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra performs with great skill and pathos, and conductor Johannes Gustavsson draws a passionate and committed reading from his forces -- Fanfare Archive, Michael Cameron, May/June 2009