Although it has been most gratifying to see Stenhammar's growing representation on record (there are now three CD versions of the Second Symphony), the piano concertos have been completely neglected. I am surprised that EMI have not reissued Janos Solyom's masterly account of the Second, now 20 years old but still sounding as fresh as the day it was recorded.
The First Concerto is a much longer piece and takes no less than 50 minutes. It comes from 1893, when Stenhammar was 22: a year earlier he had made a triumphant debut in Stockholm with the Brahms D minor Concerto. Such was the success of the First Concerto at its premiere that he was invited to play it again the following year, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Richard Strauss. During the 1890s and the early years of the present century he toured the concerto, playing it several times not only in Berlin but also Copenhagen, Leipzig and Dresden. In 1903 he played it with the Halle Orchestra in Manchester under Hans Richter, to whom he promised his First Symphony (1902-03), once he had revised it. In time, however, he grew tired of the piece and after the composition of the Second Concerto, became careless as to its fate. On every occasion he played it, the only copy of the score and parts was despatched by his German publisher and then returned, and even when the parts once went astray after a performance (they eventually turned up in Norway), he made no special effort to have a copy made. Both the autograph and the orchestral parts were destroyed when the publishing house of Hainauer in Breslau was bombed during the Second World War. Fortunately the piano score and a short score survived, and Kurt Atterburg (of Dollar Symphony fame) who had heard Stenhammar play the work several times, reconstructed the orchestral part from memory in 1946.
Thanks to him, the concerto has been rescued (and probably improved as contemporaries spoke of the scoring as being thick) though this 1977 account is its only recording. I have replayed the LP (not generally available in the UK) from time to time and always with growing pleasure. The first movement is not as long as the Brahms D minor but is the longest of the four. However, the invention is fresh, and although there is a good deal of Brahms, Schumann and, particularly in the scherzo, Saint-Saens, Stenhammar even in his Op. 1 is very much his own man. The slow movement is undoubtedly garrulous—and as with the Second Symphony, the finale is the weakest movement. But Stenhammar at his second-best still commands admiration, for his spontaneity and warmth. The scherzo is both more fetching and, I think, fresher than the corresponding movement of the Second Concerto. It is very well played by Irene Mannheimer and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Charles Dutoit.
On CD there is a bonus in the form of a recent recording of the Sensommarnatter (''Late summer nights'') which is somewhat later than the concerto, though not as late as its opus number implies. According to Bo Wallner, the pieces come from the turn of the century but were not put into their final shape until 1914. They have great charm and like so much of Stenhammar grow on one. I have always found the middle one, a curious blend of late Brahms and Debussy. (It is worth mentioning that there are two pieces omitted from the five Stenhammar published, which have been recorded by Lucia Negro on Bluebell—nla.) Irene Mannheimer plays these most persuasively though I find the last a shade slow.'