Andersson

Gösta Nystroem may have been diffident in his life decisions – he only chose music as a career in his mid-thirties – but it is clear from the two works on this 2004 BIS release that he was an earnest composer indeed when he set his mind to it. Perhaps too earnest: the Symphony No. 4, "Sinfonia shakespeariana," and the Symphony No. 6, "Sinfonia Tramontana," are long essays of some technical competence, but also unrelievedly gray, joyless creations that require a great deal of patience to get through.

Former ABBA members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus turned to an epic series of novels by Vilhelm Moberg about the plight of 19th century Swedish emigrants in America as the source for their epic, four-hour musical Kristina, which had its premiere in Malmö in 1995. The compression of 1,800 pages of narrative into a single evening necessitates some radical condensation, but the reviews of that production testify that it was a powerfully effective, coherent, and moving experience.

Jazz on life and death! In There Is No Future, Swedish jazz singer Sara Aldén makes her album debut with self-written music and arranged jazz standards with a focus on grand crescendos and vulnerable intimacy. She creates jazz as if her life depended on it where the question of the end of everything is allowed to exist, the small endings and the big ones. Sara Aldén and her trio present a musical sinkhole in the ongoing history of jazz, where doom-filled and intimate compositions alternate with dizzying arpeggios and dystopian and lyrical sound worlds.

Sabine Erdmann may be a harpsichordist. But she’s also in love with her organ. So, she instantly caught fire when two friends suggested she should record a CD on it with music from the time of Heinrich Biber. There was no deeper concept, no precise plan. But with just two phone calls, Sabine had set up a trio of musicians from Berlin’s dynamic historically informed practise scene. Immediately, they began searching for rewarding and surprising repertoire.

Kurt Atterberg (1887-1974) became briefly notorious when he won a $10,000 prize for a symphony in commemoration of Schubert in 1928, then later admitted he had written the piece with a cynical attitude simply to win the prize. (It became known in Sweden as his Dollar Symphony.) But he was a serious composer of some accomplishment, although his late-romantic style hardly seems to belong to the 20th century. Oddly, the later Piano Concerto (completed in 1935) seems like the less successful work here, as Atterberg strives for a heroic style that doesn't seem natural to him. The earlier Violin Concerto (1914) has a rhapsodic quality that suits the nature of the instrument well and will entertain a listener who doesn't insist on Beethovenian development. The performances and recordings are obviously labors of love and present the music quite well. –Leslie Gerber

60 years have passed since the release of a recording that would change Swedish jazz forever. Bill Evans, with his incredible touch and mastery of harmony has made an undeniable imprint on jazz musicians all over the world - and through his collaboration with Monica Zetterlund on "Waltz for Debby" in 1964, a new era for Scandinavian music was born.Impressions of Evans is an effort to pay tribute to this - a gesture of gratitude for making pine trees and 5th Avenue come together in a remarkably seamless, beautiful way and for being the perfect example of how one plus one sometimes equals three.