This new album, with performances and recorded sound that place it ahead of the competition, has an adventurous programme including a coupling of two of [Atterberg’s] most appealing symphonies.

The Dollar Symphony as Atterberg’s Sixth Symphony came to be known is a very striking and accessible work. The music of the opening movement could have been penned for an Errol Flynn swashbuckler romance. Its tone is brazenly noble and heroic with thrilling fanfares, a dash of romance and a little folk material. The lovely central Adagio is sweetly lyrical with a gorgeous long-breathed theme over rippling ostinatos with a suggestion maybe of gentle breezes skimming over placid lake waters working up slowly to an impassioned climax reminiscent of the finale of Atterberg’s West Coast Pictures Third Symphony. The scampering finale brings one back to earth with a perky, cheeky lampooning of Hollywood-style material.

The Symphony No. 4 Sinfonia piccolo, based on Swedish national melodies begins ferociously and urgently but soon calms. A merry rustic tune over a restless ostinato takes over. Sibelius-like quivering strings, soft horn-calls and pert woodwinds add atmosphere before urgent drum-rolls summon a short stormy episode that is banished to make way for happy-go-lucky, tuneful material. A quiet long-held note mysteriously opens the exquisite second movement, pastoral in character, possibly a serene landscape where winter is giving way to spring. The music here develops into a magical, romantically lyrical episode with sweeping strings and tender horn-calls. The very brief buoyant scherzo struts and brags while the finale dances away happily to a witty ending.

Atterberg’s beautiful and affecting Suite No. 3 is scored for strings with solo passages for a violin and a viola. It was written as incidental music to a play set in a convent where a nun is abducted by her lover as she prays beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary. Without anybody noticing anything, Mary takes the nun’s place to avoid scandal. Many years later the nun returns penitent and dying, and realises the full extent and consequences of her offences.

Atterberg’s suite is set in three movements with the solo violin affecting the part of the nun while the viola is the lover. The opening Prelude is sacred and pious in style, and reminiscent of Vaughan Williams mystical music as is material in the second movement which pitches the unsure and vulnerable feelings of the nun against the ardent pleadings of her lover. The finale’s material is in the form of a distorted waltz, carrying memories of the nun’s sinful past and recalling Sibelius’s Valse Triste.

En värmlandsrapsodi emerges as a fond—almost, in places, a dreamily, magical idyll. It brims with quotations from popular regional melodies and one is struck by how seemingly accurately Atterberg’s orchestration uncannily imitates the ‘rural dialectic’ playing of these tunes. Delius, too, is
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