Pettersson - Sym No 2, Sym Movement - Alun Francis, BBC Scottish SO (1994) [Philidor; FLAC]

Allan Pettersson is now considered one of the most important Swedish composers of the 20th century. In his lifetime, he had several champions but stood outside the musical mainstream, with his large-scaled, expressively grim scores. A Honegger pupil, his life wasn't easy: a violent, alcoholic father, and a mid-life diagnosis of crippling arthritis. Still, he continued composing to the end. His entire symphonic legacy--effectively 15, since the first and seventeenth were unfinished--have now been recorded complete, though a few have multiple recordings to their credit.

Pettersson was so enraged with his First Symphony that he tore it to pieces, and its orchestration was only assembled in recent years from various comments and indications in his notes. His Second was written while still a student of the arch-serialist Rene Leibowitz, who was so much of a Schoenberg zealot that he declared to Pettersson, who liked Alban Berg, "Berg is impure!" The work was begun in secret, since Pettersson knew his teacher would hate it, and concluded after his return to Stockholm from Paris in the early 1950s. As with so much else he wrote in the form, it is esssentially in a single movement.

The Symphonic Movement was written 20 years later, as a film commission without an actual visual subject.


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http://kickasstorrents.ee/community/...-stuff/?page=14#post16264001