The Swedish Cello

This album constitutes a comprehensive walkthrough of Swedish music written with the cello as the protagonist. Looking back through history, one can conclude that, unlike their colleagues on the European continent, the great Swedish composers discovered the cello’s soloistic potential relatively late. Whether this was due to a lack of sufficiently virtuosic musicians or of knowledge of the instrument’s possibilities is of course hard to speculate around, but it’s undeniably quite strange that almost none of Sweden’s great names of the Romantic era (like Wilhelm Stenhammar, Hugo Alfvén, Franz Berwald, and Wilhelm Peterson-Berger) yielded any more than a few individual cello pieces. Especially when considering how composers all over the rest of Europe started producing concertos and sonatas for this most expressive instrument, at a rate where musicians could hardly keep up.

Exceptions occur, of course, and a couple of them start and finish this big compilation respectively – and big it certainly is, for in the 20th century everything would change! As if there had been a long suppressed need of Swedish cello music, suddenly the masterworks started coming one after the other, and today it’s hard to find any Swedish composer of the last century who didn’t write for the cello. Greats like Lars-Erik Larsson, Gösta Nystroem, Gunnar de Frumerie, and Dag Wirén have all composed a cello concerto each – Hilding Rosenberg wrote two! The chamber and solo repertoire was also expanded rapidly during this time, and the cello’s broad range and enormous sound spectrum seemed to appeal to the modernist and postmodern composers especially.

On these recordings you’ll hear many of Sweden’s finest cellists of the modern times, like Frans Helmersson, Mats Lidström, and Torleif Thedéen, as well as esteemed conductors like Leif Segerstam, Stig Westerberg, and Göran W Nilson.