Strindberg loved the music of Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, so it’s good to see one of the dramatist’s paintings adorning the front of this disc. But the music of which Strindberg was so fond was the songs and piano miniatures which still represent Peterson-Berger at his most beguiling. The symphonies are something else besides. The somewhat featureless landscapes of the First and Fifth have been valiantly recorded by the Swedish Royal Opera Orchestra (Sterling, 1/98); now the Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra turns to the Second.
The Journey to the South, as it’s called, is an episodic and expressively fitful dream-fantasy voyage, written ten years before Peterson-Berger made his own obligatory Italian journey. As the music leaves the limping rhythms of northern discontent, the melodic span broadens, orchestration becomes livelier, if hardly more subtle – and we arrive in Greece. This provokes a little percussive Dionysian delirium, a chaste Debussian Adagio in ‘The Temple of Eros’, and a tarantella of a Platonic ‘Symposium’.
By the third movement it’s quite a relief that the composer has a touch of ‘Homesickness’ and, after a thematic recollection or two, returns north. Home to a melancholy, salonesque violin Romance, sensitively played by Ulf Wallin, to an orchestration of a winsome little Oriental Dance, originally for piano, and to the pomp and circumstance of the Prelude to his cantata Sveagaldrar.
Neither the playing nor the sound quality is of the most sophisticated here; but this is none the less a useful documentation of yet another manifestation of the cultural Zeitgeist of turn-of-the-century Sweden.'