Alfvén: Cantatas

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Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén tends to run hot and cold; when he's hot, such as in his most famous work Midsommorvaka, Op. 19 (aka, "Midsummer Vigil" or Swedish Rhapsody No. 1), Alfvén is bright, personable, colorful, and engaging, or as in the best of symphonies, dark, morose, compelling, and inspired. When he runs cold, Alfvén is merely going through the motions, producing music for the sake of producing music, and he was well aware of such capability, once commenting that the first movement of his Fifth Symphony was "the least bad thing that I have written." Alfvén was a particularly prolific composer of vocal and choral music with orchestra, and Sterling's disc Hugo Alfvén: Cantatas -- featuring soloists Lena Hoel and Karl Magnus Fredriksson, the Royal Philharmonic Choir of Stockholm, and the Gävle Symphony Orchestra -- manages to wrest three works out of Alfvén's canon that touch on both qualitative points, and one that falls in between.
The one that "falls in between" is Alfvén's first cantata, At the Turn of the Century, Op. 12 (1899). This is a fascinating work, sounding a little like Wagner meets Sibelius, or maybe more accurately what Sibelius might have sounded like had he followed Wagner more closely as a model. Alfvén heralds the new century in Wagnerian fashion with the assistance of a slightly lurid text by symbolist poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt; owing to the idiom, At the Turn of the Century is predictable in some ways; however, it defeats one's obvious expectations in others and has an aspect of northern chilliness that is not Wagnerian. Likewise, it has a lovely and treacherously difficult soprano part that is sung well here by Lena Hoel, not perfectly, perhaps, but her voice has a unique sweetness that makes it especially attractive, even in projecting the fervor of Karlfeldt's purple passions, semi-disguised as regionalism.
Had anyone on the project known of what the twentieth century was going to bring to Europe in terms of death and destruction, perhaps the greeting would have been more reserved; Alfvén's Cantata for the 1917 Reformation Festivities in Uppsala, Op. 36 (1917), opens with a dark and lengthy movement that reflects a chastened, war-weary national mood and is hardly "festive." The festivities begin in the second movement, and this is Alfvén going through the motions; certain ideas and motifs, while attractive in their own right, are simply used to death, and one grows tired of the repetition well before the party is over. This Cantata is informative, however, in reaffirming the sense of connection that Sweden felt with German culture, one that the Hilding Rosenbergs and Karl-Birger Blømdahls would later attempt to wipe away.
Alfvén's The Bells, Op. 13 (1900), is not so much a cantata as a long orchestral song setting with baritone, and the text is not the oft-set effort by Edgar Allan Poe but an uncharacteristically patriotic effort by arch-liberal physiologist Frithiof Holmgren. The Bells represents Alfvén firing on all cylinders with a gorgeous and richly variable orchestration that is lush without being particularly opulent, in keeping with the somewhat pious nature of the text. Sterling's recording, as usual, is terrific, and The Bells benefits by a strong outing by baritone Fredriksson, and the orchestral playing throughout the disc is top caliber. The only complaint is that one wishes chorusmaster Ragnar Bohlin had cracked the whip more with the Royal Philharmonic Choir of Stockholm; for much of the time it sounds as a chorus functioning within the context of an orchestra and not like the main event, which according to the information on the title page of two of these works, they are. There are also some moments of loose coordination in the chorus that certainly could have been improved; however, if one is a devotee of Alfvén, then you will most likely be grateful to have access to these rare works in the first place.

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