Symphony No. 4 (1958-1959)
By now, the paradigm is well-established: Pettersson’s music is one of disruptive struggle, where contrasting, sometimes contradictory, musical ideas jostle and collide in a cycle of seemingly unstoppable volatility. In his previous work, the Concerto No. 3 for String Orchestra, Pettersson had allowed himself a greater expanse of lyrical outpouring than ever before. Symphony No. 4 also features intense lyricism, but of a very different kind, and occupying a more dramatic role within the work’s narrative.
Structured in a single movement, the symphony gets going in a manner that by now feels familiar: by not getting going, at least, not in a way that’s consistent. A quick rhythmic falling idea is heard very early, beside softer, slower material, two adjacent layers that both falter barely a minute in as the momentum gives up. Things appear to be freed by a marked descending idea but the strings end up stuck in a loop, and the symphony effectively starts again a minute later, attaining weight through simple repetition and accumulation. This, too, blows itself out, and we enter an opposite place of lyricism where, as in Concerto No. 3, its tonal clarity is marred by dissonance causing friction against it. It goes without saying that this is unable to continue for long, until the rhythmic falling idea starts up again. It’s tempting during the first half of the piece to regard certain ideas as gaining greater traction – such as when the original melodic impulse leads to another one, distinctly hymn-like, that feels a world away from everything else around it. But we’re confronted by such an eclectic disorientation of ideas (some that appear from nowhere, never to be heard again) that, at this stage, everything is as volatile as ever.
What gives long-term shape to this flux are two sequences – at around 19 and 25 minutes into the work – where Pettersson makes everything conspicuously nebulous. These go in two directions. The first leads to a powerful, almost militaristic tutti climax, angry and raw, driven along by drums and winds. The second finds its way to the most stable lyrical passage in the entire work. These sequences and their outcomes introduce crucial instances of unequivocal music, where – even though it’s only for a relatively short time – the symphony’s key inclinations are able to speak clearly. One should know better than to expect a clear resolution at the end of the work, but these oases of clarity are all the more meaningful taking place in the midst of such a troubled soundscape.
A 1970 recording of the piece by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Sergiu Comissiona was released by BIS in a lavish vinyl box set in the mid-’80s but has never been reissued. i was recently able to track down a copy that arrived just a few days ago, but (lacking a record player) i’ve not yet been able to explore it; i’ll add some details about it in due course. Of the two more recent recordings, Alun Francis and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken take a similar approach to the work as they did to Symphony No. 3, emphasising its mercuriality, with a concomitant sense that things are close to becoming out of control. Certainly, the Fourth Symphony is arguably a more fundamentally disruptive work than anything Pettersson had hitherto composed, yet in their recording what emerges from this is a potent sense of futility, as if the effort to continue is tantamount to stupidity. That’s to take nothing away from the performance, which is vibrant and intense at both ends of the dramatic spectrum, and those periods where the music becomes fleetingly concrete, the first one especially, are impressively strong.
Greater subtlety and a better long-term sense of the symphonic narrative comes across in the recording by Christian Lindberg with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. Where Francis focuses on conflict, Lindberg prefers confusion, which makes the rapid-fire cancelling out of idea after idea almost more a symptom of a disordered mind. This works so well because of the effect it has on later episodes, such as the one around nine minutes in, where everything becomes dreadfully ominous, no longer somewhere passively confused but actively dangerous. Furthermore, those nebulous sequences i mentioned become fascinating “in between” places in this performance, vital passages where we sense something could finally be at least partially resolved. There are no holds barred in Norrköping’s rendition of the militaristic climax, propelled along like the kind of grotesque march of which Mahler would have been proud. As for the lyrical outcome, Lindberg makes it truly gorgeous, even allowing a quasi-filmic gloss over it. This isn’t remotely inappropriate, as this is far and away the most ostensibly untroubled music Pettersson had yet composed. As with the hymn-like glimpses earlier (presented as a beautifully fragile and poignant moment of calm), this is music a world away from the agony of the Mesto movement in Concerto No. 3, soft and relaxed. Which only makes the work’s denouement more grimly awful, crashes and shrieks as if from nowhere, momentum fizzling out, and a return to disorientation.
Symphony No. 5 (1960-1962)
Pettersson’s Fifth Symphony ups the ante somewhat, by taking the processes of disruption and flux and focusing them. Where wildly contrasting ideas previously kept interrupting each other, resulting in an unstable, disorienting soundworld, in Symphony No. 5 the extremes of contrast are essentially gone, replaced with a return of the obsessive streak that occurred in many of Pettersson’s earliest works. The Four Improvisations for String Trio, the incomplete First Symphony and Concerto No. 2 for String Orchestra all include hints or references to Shostakovich’s famous DSCH motif, whereas in Symphony No. 5 Pettersson uses a motif that can be thought of as a contracted version of it: rising a semitone, falling a tone, then falling another semitone. It only emerges gradually, from various forms of rhythmic cell that are similar, all of which involve some kind of falling (another tendency in the work is for ideas to feel dragged inexorably downwards).
The work begins with what is surely one of the most abject openings of any piece of music, slow, angular and unfathomably dark. It moves into a moment suggestive of Bruckner, and even the prospect of a cadence but, as we know all too well from Pettersson’s symphonies, that’s not going to happen, and instead slips sideways into strange, dronal music. The symphony dwells in this forlorn state for a time, after which, following weird blank notes from the strings, its trajectory begins to take shape. The motif starts to take hold, and with it the sense of an attempt to make progress, perhaps even to rekindle something of the contrapuntal élan heard in the first two Concertos for String Orchestra. Yet the whole notion of progress is forever complicated in Symphony No. 5. Momentum, as in the previous symphonies, tends to chug rather than drive along, made more strenuous by regular large-scale swells that lead to tremulous or dazed aftermaths. Any time that a melodic tendril tries to unfurl, it finds itself going in circles, at the mercy of obfuscated harmony, a brute force crescendo or, a little underway halfway through, a gruff attitude from the more hefty lower strings.
This brings about one of the most horrifying moments in all orchestral music, a huge cry of agony, after which the apparent boisterousness of the music is like a pained, enraged reaction, messily throwing weight around. From here on out, the work finds itself more and more hemmed in within extended sequences where immense walls of sound surround on all sides. One of the most marvellous things about this – and this applies to Pettersson’s entire output – is that at no point does it push us away; we’re kept engaged through all of this profound pain. It’s only in the closing section of the work (its last 10 minutes) where the seemingly relentless unyielding and impenetrable music abruptly recedes, and there are some final attempts to sing. The obsessive motif, which throughout all this has been broken up into its component intervals of a rising or falling semitone, recurs one final time in an enormous outburst, whereupon it’s as if everything collapses, and we’re back to chugging momentum and drones. In the final minute the drone moves down by a fifth, the most unconvincing and imperfect of perfect cadences, dying away with shellshocked octaves.
It’s surprising that a work of such harrowing, calamitous scope as this has been recorded four times. One made by the Berliner Sibelius Orchestra under Andreas Peer Kähler in the mid-1980s, as with some others i’ve mentioned, benefits from a certain lack of warmth in the lower registers. On the one hand it robs the performance of oomph in the bass, yet this only makes the expressionistic extremity of Symphony No. 5 more viscerally real. The cry of agony is more distressing in this performance than any of the others, and while some may find its shifted palette too much to take in a piece like this, it’s a deeply compelling, essential recording. BIS has recorded the symphony twice, and they wisely chose not to include in the Complete Edition the one by Moshe Atzmon with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, from 1990. On the one hand, it’s arguably by far the best performance of the dark introduction, made to feel almost unbearable from the outset, at times even sounding weirdly inhuman. But the orchestra was evidently recorded at something of a distance, in the process losing power and making the sense of relentlessness a trait of the performance rather than the piece. Too often, all of that oppression simply sounds inert, merely surly rather than truly threatening. Much stronger is CPO’s recording from 1996, by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken conducted by Alun Francis. Francis really teases out details in the introduction that can get lost in the darkness, delivering a profound sense of pathos, and in the subsequent melee, Saarbrücken are fabulous at embodying (without exaggeration) the growing anguish, both from the inward obsession and the outward disruption. The horns, in particular, excel at suggesting howls of pain. The end of the work is made here into a simple, entirely appropriate, giving up.
BIS’s other recording, included in the Complete Edition, goes further. Once again featuring the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra and Christian Lindberg, they bring out even more important music in the introduction, above all highlighting the gravity – both literal and figurative – of the music, all in a permanent state of declination. Lindberg makes the aftermaths of the crescendos horribly palpable, as if the music were numbed due to overload, and the agonised cry is genuinely horrendous, exacerbated due to the potency in this recording of the heavy brass, who pound away with almost diabolical glee at this point. So many more inner details are revealed, which only makes the realisation of, and our immersion into, this toxic soundworld all the more total, those walls of sound seemingly crushing us from every direction. The sense of threat is everywhere, realised in the bewildering tutti convolutions that become dense, swirling miasmas; and a concomitant sense of dread is also everywhere, traumatised by the seemingly endless cruelty of a situation where all attempts to move, let alone speak, are impossible. How else could the symphony end, but with an abrupt, complete burnout.
