Having spent a little over a decade exploring chamber and vocal music, from 1951 onward the trajectory of Allan Pettersson’s compositional journey changed, and changed permanently. In a similar way to Mahler, as soon as Pettersson began work on his first symphony, in 1951, it evidently became clear to him that this was the ideal mode of expression for him. Almost everything he wrote for the next three decades would be a symphony, working at a consistent rate of one or two each year.
Symphony No. 1 (1951-)
There’s another Mahler connection, inasmuch as the situation surrounding Pettersson’s First Symphony is akin to that of Mahler last (the 10th). Pettersson worked on the score for about a year, at which point struggles with the piece clearly overtook him, and he put it aside to work on a new symphony. He would return to it on various occasions over the years, always clearly regarding it as his first symphony (the next one was emphatically called No. 2), but at his death in 1980 it remained incomplete. Christian Lindberg has done for Pettersson’s First what Deryck Cooke did so superbly for Mahler’s Tenth, approaching the score with the a tentative, sympathetic approach that seeks not to add anything (in this respect, he actually goes less far than Cooke, who fleshed out missing orchestration) but simply to make sense of the work and present it as it stands. (Lindberg, like Cooke, also had to contend with the issue of permission (or not) of the composer’s widow; just like Alma Mahler enthusiastically gave consent for Cooke’s “Performing version” only after hearing the play-through broadcast on radio, so Gudrun Pettersson was only happy to accept Lindberg’s “Performance edition” after hearing it in concert.)
What we have is the first 30 minutes of a symphony that very clearly extends further many of the key features heard in his immediately preceding works. Most obvious is the work’s fundamental elasticity – so important in Concerto No. 1 for String Orchestra – which here drags the symphony back and forth between more gentle, reflective music and pounding, driving momentum. There are times during this when Pettersson suggests the possibility that this tension could erupt; conversely, on other occasions there’s the prospect of a middle way forward, the two extremes brought together and merged. The other tension carried over from Pettersson’s earlier works is that between individual and tutti writing. The chamber-like passages tend to have a heightened quality to them, such that their contemplative tone feels strained, no less intense than the forceful, large-scale music around them. There are times when the piece suggests some of the devices used by Shostakovich in his symphonies – particularly a sequence around seven minutes in where an oscillating third deep in the basses is combined with winds very high overhead – yet aside from slight evocations like this Symphony No. 1 is overwhelmingly personal, entirely in keeping with everything Pettersson had composed up until this point. The fact that the work increasingly gives the impression of short-term uncertainty rather than long-term confidence in its latter stages (similar to what happens in Concerto No. 1 for Violin and String Quartet) seems entirely a by-product of the fact that, at this point, the music on the page is literally disappearing, petering out at its end.
As a “story so far”, Symphony No. 1 is a fascinating insight into Pettersson’s first step on the path that would end up defining his career. At its best, it’s thrilling, and also intriguing, featuring a brief but clear quotation from one of his Barfotasånger partway through (something that would recur in later works). Though completed in 2011, to date Christian Lindberg’s “Performance version” of Symphony No. 1 has only been recorded once, by the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lindberg himself, included in the Complete Edition. It’s a superb, vivid performance, but quite apart from that it’s marvellous that Lindberg was so committed to taking a hands-off approach to the score. Considering the egregiously inept monstrosities that assorted idiots (i.e. everyone other than Deryck Cooke) have produced as so-called “completions” of Mahler’s Tenth, the fact that this is presented as is, a literal fragment of a work in progress, leaves us with the truest and best possible picture we can ever have of what this symphony might have been. The Complete Edition also includes a DVD featuring a one-hour documentary about the symphony, detailing its difficult composition process and the even more difficult deciphering process before it could be performed.
Symphony No. 2 (1952-1953)
If there’s something unavoidably provisional about Symphony No. 1, the same could also be said for Symphony No. 2, despite the fact that on this occasion Pettersson was able to complete the work. Cast as a single, 45-minute movement, despite having a number of temporally distinct subsections, the work once again displays the composer’s instinct for a music that’s fundamentally volatile. Here, it’s as if the sheer emotional weight of the work – and the act of attempting to articulate it – is actively disrupting itself, which could be heard as an extension, perhaps even a clarification, of the push-pull behaviour that’s been so prevalent in Pettersson’s scores up to this point.
In Symphony No. 2 Pettersson is much more subtle in the character of his musical behaviours, with the internal struggles framed not so much by stark contrasts but a more variegated musical language. That being said, one of the work’s principal aspects – an aspect fundamental to most of Pettersson’s future output – is its binary of lyricism and momentum, though here both manifest in a range of forms. The former has a dark, subdued nature, introduced right at the start in the symphony’s extended opening meditation, which also introduces an insistent (less obsessive, this time) mordent motif slightly redolent of similar ones in both Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony (composed only a decade earlier) and also Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. In the midst of this we experience flashes of energy and muscle, which occasionally offer up glimpses of something dance-like – even oom-pahs! – that seems bizarrely incongruous in this context. That’s a definite contrast, though as the work continues it demonstrates an ambiguity of tempo in which anything ostensibly brisk is made hard to read: it could be quick, or only moderately so, or both, or neither. Whatever it is, it doesn’t stay that way for long; only the slowest, most reflective sequences are both clear and (over the work as a whole) consistent, despite being regularly interrupted. Furthermore, this fundamental volatility is surprisingly restrained; Pettersson rarely gets the entire orchestra involved – and when he does, it’s again not for long – creating the curious effect of a kind of passive-aggressive language that acts more by stealth and implication than through overt heft. As such, even the most excited bursts of florid acrobatics or vertiginous swells can be, and invariably are, cancelled as swiftly as they materialise.
Of the three recordings of the work, the earliest, by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra with Stig Westerberg is by far the quickest, and in some respects this works to its advantage. The recording suffers a touch due to its age (made in the 1960s), being sonically limited in the work’s larger passages, and the orchestra often sounds less like a homogeneous group of players blending and interpenetrating than a bunch of timbrally discrete sections playing side by side (though their respective timbres are undeniably lovely). Depending on your perspective, Westerberg’s briskness either elides some of the effects of the volatile narrative, or (as i feel) skips over them with a bit too much of a carefree attitude, when the reality is the complete opposite.
Much more telling is Alun Francis’ interpretation with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Francis really understands that it’s the slow material that is essentially the ‘default’ for this symphony, and he allows far more time to the opening section, which in turn makes the glimpses of weirdly upbeat music sound all the more grotesquely ominous and disorienting. There’s an extended lyrical sequence two-thirds of the way through the work, and having begun in that way, this section (which sounds oddly overlong in Westerberg’s reading) makes total sense. One of the most compelling questions this recording raises is whether it’s the freely meandering volatile passages or the spurts of militaristic regularity that are the more unsettling.
Most emotionally-charged of all is the recording in the Complete Edition, by the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christian Lindberg, which is also the most expansive of the three, running nearly six minutes longer than Westerberg. Lindberg makes the trudging opening abject in its downcast pallor, to the extent that the symphony sounds positively numb at the start. The subsequent volatility has a distinct air of menace, all the more troubling when, six minutes in, it feels like we’re back where we started. A highlight of this recording is the way the different musical motivations, lyrical and energetic, become highly dramatic, not jump cutting between them but fluidly transforming before our ears. As such, there’s a pervading impression of a single-minded sense of purpose at work throughout the symphony, something noticeably absent from Westerberg’s recording (and to a lesser extent Francis’ too). There are one or two marvellously unexpected orchestrational touches that this recording reveals with absolute clarity – ghostly octave unisons shortly before the end are especially striking – and Norrköping and Lindberg allow the composer’s lack of interest in playing into our expectations to speak transparently; there’s no clear outcome here, still less a resolution. All of which begs the question: maybe that petering out in the unfinished Symphony No. 1 is, in Pettersson’s particular language, absolutely the right ending.
Symphony No. 3 (1954-1955)
Although Pettersson’s Symphony No. 3 is divided into the conventional four-movement scheme, they continue without a break and as such the work proceeds in a similar way to the preceding symphony. That being said, the second movement, marked ‘Largo con espressione’ (“con espressione” – so inadequate for Pettersson’s music), is the first extended melodic focus to appear in his symphonies, enabling it to function more meaningfully as a slow movement. However, the work again displays volatility, such that the expressive act is constantly affected seemingly from both without and within, as the music keeps being driven on and broken up. The brass, though not all-important, nonetheless play a catalytic role in this, in no small part due to the amount of weight Pettersson gives them. Yet while the fundamentally erratic nature of the music has an undeniable effect on the symphony’s emotional arc, what makes the first movement in particular so arresting is the constant flow of ever-changing invention, encompassing light, buoyant material, languid chugging rhythms, and polarised melodic passages (again suggestive of Shostakovich), shot through with a myriad unexpected bangs, crashes and bright blazes. It’s exhilarating to be in the midst of all this, but also challenging due to the fact that any and all ideas feel as if they’re being militated against by something else: blowing hot and cold, ferocious and timid, robust and fragile, playful and serious, angry and despairing. Nothing dominates, nothing prevails – to the extent that the third movement’s indication “deciso” suggests a basic determination to continue rather than something actually decisive (still less decided) – and while Symphony No. 3 doesn’t possess the kind of clear tragic trajectory heard in Mahler’s Sixth, one nonetheless comes away from it with the overwhelming impression of a music filled with seemingly limitless power and potential that’s ultimately been frustrated and thwarted.
The 1994 recording of the work by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken with Alun Francis goes some way to conveying all this. There’s a disctinct impression, even in the opening minutes, that things might be soon getting out of control, and Francis elicits from the brass a palpable sense of glowering threat that gives their actions all the more impact. However, this is a performance that, without obviously dragging, nonetheless underplays the mercurial nature of the music, squandering that early impression and leaving us with a symphony that’s merely changeable, at most fickle. The slow movement even sounds a tad noodling at times, and while they get back on track in the third movement, which becomes thrillingly exciting as it continues, by the end we’re back to a place of indecision rather than volatility. None of this is helped by the fact that the recording lacks warmth, making it a touch more shrill than it should be.
The only other recording of Symphony No. 3 to date was made the following year, by the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra with Leif Segerstam, included in the Complete Edition. It doesn’t hold back in its presentation of both the music’s power and invention. First, the recording is superbly, almost intimidatingly, up close, seemingly surrounding us on all sides and threatening to collapse on top of us. That’s impressive enough, yet the way they convey the continual flux of musical behaviour is astounding. One needs to approach Pettersson’s symphonies allowing for the fact that there’s a lot more to them than just a litany of difficulty, disruption and pain, and in Symphony No. 3 the whirlwind of creative energy and imagination is absolutely stunning. Anyone wanting one particular idea to come out on top is going to be disappointed, but for everyone else, this is a hugely expressive performance of a musical narrative that lays its struggles bare, in all their honest, multifaceted glare and glory.
