Into The River

The Green River, the most significant tributary of the Colorado River, runs 730 miles from the glaciers of Wyoming to the desert canyons of Utah. Over its course it meanders through ranches, cities, national parks, endangered fish habitats, and some of the most significant natural gas fields in the country, as it provides water for 33 million people. Stopped up by dams, slaked off by irrigation, and dried up by cities, the Green is crucial, overused, and at risk, now more than ever.

The Nagara River in Gifu Prefecture is one of Japan's most beautiful. Running for 72km north-south along the stream is the Nagaragawa Railway. The run takes about 2 hours and includes 38 stations. The people who live along the line have intimate relationships with the river. A highly skilled boatwright who uses ancient techniques to build wooden river ships. A middle-aged couple celebrates the river and mountain scenery at their country inn. A man refocuses his life on the river after giving up on his dream of making music overseas.

With this fifth disc in a series released one by one since 2000, cpo has issued all nine symphonies by Kurt Atterberg (1887-1974), Sweden’s nearest counterpart of Finland’s Sibelius and Denmark’s Nielsen, although he was born a generation later without quite their sharply honed and distinctive personalities. But his music is nonetheless distinguished—at best and characterful, without kowtowing to the avant-gardes between World Wars I and II, or after II. Atterberg was basically a tonal composer who made dissonance a part of his vocabulary but not a lodestone.