Örgryte nya kyrka VÄGUS Winter Concert

"When will the angel come who gives the soul again its song, so simple and clear that a child will stop crying?" (Allan Pettersson) October 13th 1968 is a big day in Swedish music history: Allan Pettersson's seventh symphony is played for the first time by the Stockholm Philharmonic under conductor Antal Doráti. Pettersson was not well known and the symphony's enormous success launched the reclusive composer both within Sweden and internationally as a great symphonic master. Several great symphonies would follow, but the Seventh is still considered the absolute pinnacle of the Swedish repertoire today. How could the breakthrough be so dramatic? And what lies behind the work's strength and ability to fascinate and touch even today? In the 60s, modernism was very much in vogue - in classical music, this meant avoiding at all costs anything resembling conventional melodies or harmonies. Instead, one would focus on an intellectually tight organization of atonal timbres. Pettersson dismissed this music as "cracking somersaults". His ability to span the arc between menacing dissonance and comforting harmony in one and the same work was the primary reason behind the work's sensational success in 1968. A work that took the anxiety of the Cold War seriously, but could also offer warmth and comfort. Within every work of art worth the name there is a built-in tension between the new and the old, between expectation and surprise, between tradition and renewal. Avant-gardism reached a dead end by excluding anything that could be interpreted as traditional. Pettersson's music, on the other hand, embraces both opposites and articulates them in a technically masterful and humanly compelling way. At the beginning of the symphony, a limping figure built on a semitone C-Ciss is heard in the base, plus a loop that longs upwards to Fiss. In the simplest way imaginable, a feeling of worry and anxiety is created. This is reinforced when the semitones are stacked in short figures against each other. The tension subsides and out of the silence the simple B minor chords of the trombone are heard for the first time, which will permeate the entire work - the music's DNA, so to speak. These three elements - semitone motifs, lyrical minor melodies and B minor chords - provide Pettersson with the entire palette for his symphony. Traditionally, a symphony contains several movements, but Pettersson writes a single long movement, although there are clear phases in the music that remind of the tradition - for example the wonderfully beautiful Fiss major passage in the strings after almost half an hour, the work's "slow movement". In the end, however, it is in B minor that the work ebbs, in a mood of trust and acceptance. The anxiety has subsided and our child has stopped crying. KIM PHIPPS