Let's try an experiment...
Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 07/09/2008
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This experiment will not work if you speak fluent Swedish or if you already know a bunch about Allan Pettersson. Okay? Go right now to the amazon samples of these songs; the longest song is just 3'19 and the samples are a full minute. Listen without paying attention to the song titles in English. Make notes and tell me what the songs are about, which are love songs, which are lullabies, which are dirges?
Pettersson wrote the poems for his 24 "Barefoot Songs" in somewhat dialectical Swedish. The texts remind me of skaldic poetry, complete with riddle-like kennings and oddly personal reflections. Here's the English for #2
CLEVER AND FIRM GRIP
It gives you a flower,
a hand that is mine,
How empty hands are
that have given away flowers.
My flower hangs slack
in a hand that is yours.
Yes, flowers do wilt
in the hands of the clever,
the clever like us.
Yes, one wishes a lot
and takes a good share,
and closes one's hand
to hold it all square.
Yes we knit our hands
around what we want,
but the best we can have
is not for hands
that grip too firmly.
Pettersson wrote his songs early in his career, while he was employed as a violist in Stockholm. He intended, he said, to write as many as Schubert, and the influence of Schubert is very clear in this single disk of Pettersson's complete songs fro soprano and piano. They sound a lot like Bartok and Mahler at times also. For such simple, folk-like songs, they are heart-poundingly poignant and very artfully supported by the piano line. Having heard the samples, you'll surely know whether they are of interest to you.
Pettersson is known primarily for his 16 symphonies, which are anything but simple and folk-like. Rather, they are fiendishly complex extensions of late Romantic musical theory, highly conservative in comparison to the serial and atonal music favored by Pettersson's closest contemporaries. They are chiefly composed as single movements of 40-60 minutes. Pettersson has a reputation as a morbid, perhaps self-pitying composer, which would be understandable considering his years of painful rheumatic paralysis and dreadful economic state. To my ears, this judgement seems inadequate. Much of Pettersson's music is foreboding and fierce, but there's also wistfulness and loveliness and whimsy -- all the qualities that you can hear in these jewel-like little songs. Pettersson himself said that he meant to put all his life into his music. I think he came close.
The soprano, Monica Groop, is superb. The pianist, Cord Garden, is masterfully delicate. Swedish is a beautiful language. Believe me, if you liked the samples, you'll be thrilled to hear the full timbres of the CD."
Track Listings (30) - Disc #1