Wilhelm Peterson-Berger was one of the most feared reviewers of his day. He was employed as music critic for Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter from 1896 to 1930 and reigned with an iron hand, the newspaper’s highest paid employee. He was not well loved since he was so strict and held that music criticism must be “ruthless.” This attitude got him into a number of infamous scrapes, one in which Joachim pupil Willy Burmester announced that he would not start his concert in Stockholm until Peterson-Berger had left the hall!
As a composer, Peterson-Berger was highly eclectic and wrote some music that might not have passed his own criticism had someone else written it. The works on this CD show a romantic composer somewhat under the influence of Wagner, who also anticipated a good many other styles. At times his music even sounds like the “pastoral” Vaughan Williams, the movie music of Max Steiner or Erich Korngold, or that of one of the composer’s heroes, Edvard Grieg! There’s only one catch, however: with the exception of Grieg, the Third Symphony (1913-15) actually precedes the work of the composers noted, so maybe it’s they who sound like Peterson-Berger. He was, in any case, a genuine late-Romantic writing music as advanced as any Nordic composer of his day, Sibelius and Nielsen included.
His Third Symphony, inspired by the geography of Lapland, is gorgeous stuff–beautifully orchestrated (note the exquisite use of piano as an orchestral instrument in the symphony) and melodically memorable–and the excellent players of the youngish Norrköping Symphony, under the sure guidance of Michail Jurowski, make the most of it. The charming Earina Suite (the word means “Spring”) and the excerpt from the comic opera The Doomsday Prophets are equally appealing and well played. I would imagine listeners might divide 50/50 as to whether these works are rediscovered masterpieces or not, but I think all would agree that hearing them at least once is worth the time invested. The recorded sound is broad, resonant, and quite exciting.
