Back in 2010, Neeme Järvi commenced his Scandinavian project\nwith the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, offering up idiomatic\nperformances of orchestral works by two of Norway’s best-loved\ncomposers, Johan Halvorsen and Johan Svendsen. Similar in its\napproach, this new survey turns to Norway’s neighbouring country,\nwith Järvi conducting the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in\norchestral works by the Swedish composer, Kurt Atterberg.

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Atterberg was one of Sweden’s leading composers of the twentieth\ncentury, not to mention a conductor, critic, and founder of The\nSociety of Swedish Composers. Largely self-taught, he developed a\ncompositional style which initially owed much to Brahms and Alfvén,\nalthough he was more inclined to paint vivid, loosely structured\nmelodic pictures than to adhere to the traditional classical\nframeworks. Tuneful, accessible, and fairly folkloristic too,\nAtterberg’s music became more impressionistic by World War I, and\nit was around this time that he composed most of the works on this\ndisc.

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Symphony No. 4 (1918) was composed in friendly competition with\na Swedish colleague, Natanael Berg. They had decided that each\nshould compose a work lasting no longer than twenty minutes, and\nthat a bass tuba should be heard in ‘splendid isolation’ somewhere\nin it. The resulting piece by Atterberg is full of humour and wit,\nthe language open and simple, and strongly inspired by Swedish folk\nmusic.

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That same year, Atterberg was asked to write music to Maurice\nMaeterlinck’s play Sœur Béatrice. For the theatre performance\nitself, he only had three musicians at his disposal, playing\nviolin, viola, and harmonium. A few years later, however, he\nreworked the harmonium part of extracts from the incidental music\nfor string orchestra, retaining the solo violin and viola, after\nwhich this became known at Suite No. 3, a work filled with beauty\nand passion, and ultimately one of his most frequently performed\npieces.

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For many years, the only work by Atterberg that circulated\nwidely outside Sweden, in performance, recording, and notoriety,\nwas his Symphony No. 6, for which in 1928 he won a prize awarded by\nthe Columbia Gramophone Company for a work in the spirit of\nSchubert, who had died 100 years earlier.

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En värmlandsrapsodi (1933) was written to mark the seventy-fifth\nbirthday of the 1909 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Selma\nLagerlöf, and it was performed for the first time in a live\nbroadcast by Swedish Radio. Upon hearing the piece, Lagerlöf wrote\nto Atterberg: ‘It was a solemn moment when we heard the rhapsody\nstreaming from the radio. We listened with great joy and excitement\nand were made happy by the echo of melodies from Värmland. May the\npiece live and win the people’s ear.’

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