Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén tends to run hot and cold; when he's hot, such as in his most famous work Midsommorvaka, Op. 19 (aka, "Midsummer Vigil" or Swedish Rhapsody No. 1), Alfvén is bright, personable, colorful, and engaging, or as in the best of symphonies, dark, morose, compelling, and inspired. When he runs cold, Alfvén is merely going through the motions, producing music for the sake of producing music, and he was well aware of such capability, once commenting that the first movement of his Fifth Symphony was "the ...
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Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén tends to run hot and cold; when he's hot, such as in his most famous work Midsommorvaka, Op. 19 (aka, "Midsummer Vigil" or Swedish Rhapsody No. 1), Alfvén is bright, personable, colorful, and engaging, or as in the best of symphonies, dark, morose, compelling, and inspired. When he runs cold, Alfvén is merely going through the motions, producing music for the sake of producing music, and he was well aware of such capability, once commenting that the first movement of his Fifth Symphony was "the least bad thing that I have written." Alfvén was a particularly prolific composer of vocal and choral music with orchestra, and Sterling's disc Hugo Alfvén: Cantatas -- featuring soloists Lena Hoel and Karl Magnus Fredriksson, the Royal Philharmonic Choir of Stockholm, and the Gävle Symphony Orchestra -- manages to wrest three works out of Alfvén's canon that touch on both qualitative points, and one that falls in between.The one that "falls in between" is Alfvén's first cantata, At...
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