Wilhelm Stenhammar - Excelsior!


Wilhelm Stenhammar died eighty years ago today, on November 20, 1927. At the beginning of the twentieth century Swedish born Stenhammar was the pre-eminent Scandinavian composer and pianist. He played his own First Piano Concerto with the Berlin Opera Orchestra conducted by Richard Strauss and with the Hallé conducted by Hans Richter, and the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch performed his concert overture Excelsior! which is on the LP shown above.

From 1907 to 1922 Stenhammar was artistic leader of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. As well as playing his own works Stenhammar performed new compositions by Strauss, Reger, Debussy, Sibelius, and Mahler in Gothenburg, and became a close friend of Carl Nielsen after programming his music. The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra has continued to perform Stenhammar's music, and in the 1980s they recorded his two symphonies and Excelsior! under their, then, principal conductor Neeme Järvi. The recordings were made in the Gothenburg Concert Hall which is seen below, and were originally issued on the two BIS LPs seen in my header and footer images.


Gothenburg Concert Hall was built in the decade after Stenhammar's death to a modern design by architect Nils Einar Ericsson, who used red maple for the interior surfaces. This resulted in exceptional acoustics which both BIS and Deutsche Grammophon have captured on some fine recordings including Järvi's cycle of the Berwald symphonies on DG.

The sound from the BIS LPs of the Stenhammar symphonies is quite outstanding, helped by heavyweight Teldec vinyl pressings. Both recordings used just five Neumann microphones routed through a Swedish radio mixer. The First Symphony was recorded in 1982 using analogue tape and no Dolby, the Second in 1983 used an early Sony PCM-F1 digital recorder. The classic BIS album designs are by the label's founder Robert von Bahr, and the typography is by Marianne von Bahr.

These magnificent BIS recordings live on in CD format. Given the vogue for Mahler and Nielsen today it is difficult to understand why Wilhelm Stenhammar's music is not better known.


BIS has also done very fine things for the music of Antal Dorati.
Thanks to our son, who lovingly created the sleeve images using an A4 scanner! Header and footer images (c) On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

JMW said…
Those are classic recordings. I love them both!
4:00 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Why cats hate Mahler symphonies

Image
My recent post ' Your cat is a music therapist ' was well appreciated judging by site traffic. So here is a codicil which raises some interesting points about synaesthesia. Reportedly Alexander Scriabin, Jean Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Franz Liszt were among the classical composers who experienced cross-over between sensory channels. The impact of narrowing sensory bandwidth as music moves from a live to a recorded environment, and then from analogue to lossy digital formats is little understood and little researched.But it may have important implications for classical music's attempts to reach a new audience, and, topically, it may be very relevant to the post-COVID experience of Zoom concerts and live music in socially distanced auditoriums . I will discuss how what we see influences what we hear in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile here is an extract from Akif Pirinçci and Rolf Degen ’s book Cat Sense which explains the synaesthetic impact of a Ma
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

The radiance of a thousand suns

Image
In August 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 120,000 people, of which 95% were civilians, were killed outright. It is estimated that a further quarter of a million died from the after effects of the explosions. Six days after the second bomb was dropped Japan surrendered unconditionally, removing the requirement for an invasion of the Japanese mainland by Allied forces , an engagement that would undoubtedly have resulted in dreadful casualties on both sides. Hopefully the music community, as well as the world, will remember 2005 as the sixtieth anniversary of these terrible events, as well as the year of the premiere of an opera by John Adams . My attempts to understand the almost incomprehensible events of 1945 led me to the recently published 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant . This is the story of the extraordinary secret community of allied scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico that, in a race against the clock, created the t
Read more

Watch Michel Petrucciani video online

Image
Back in January 2005 I wrote about legendary jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani (right), and that article remains high in my 'popular pages' listing after fifteen months. Since writing that piece Overgrown Path reader Andrew Nathan and I have been tracking down Petrucciani video footage, and just this week Andrew came up with an absolute gem that is available free on Google video. In my original article I wrote that Michel Petrucciani was a 'pianistic genius' , and it is no coincidence that he is buried in the Pierre Lachaise cemetery in Paris alongside Chopin. This 38 minute video with excellent sound (and a bonus guest appearance from the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling ) is not just essential viewing for jazz fans, it should be watched by all students of the piano - whatever their discipline. Just click here to view this important document. (The video is not hosted by On An Overgrown Path , this is a link to an external site). And to set the video into context here is m
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

Götterdämmerung

Image
That photo shows the ruins of the great 12th century Tinmel Mosque in Morocco's High Atlas mountains which collapsed in Friday night's terrible earthquake . Below is the post I wrote after my 2018 visit to Tinmel.  Four days after the earthquake I was scheduled to fly to Marrakech and then, once again,  trek in the High Atlas close to the quake's epicentre. The mountain village I would have been based in is now cut-off by landslides, and has no electricity or mobile phone connection. But we have received information that, thankfully, our Moroccan friends there are safe, although others have died in the village. Now playing: Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, Klaus Tennstedt conducting the LPO .  Is this Wagner's legendary Monsalvat? No, this is not Monsalvat, the mythical castle of the Knights of the Grail in Parsifal. My photos show the 12th century mosque in Tinmel at an altitude of 1270 metres in the High Atlas mountains 100km from Mar
Read more

Censorship by web proxy

Image
Yesterday's article about Harvard Radio station WHRB 95.3 FM included a number of occurences of the words 0rgy/ies, all in a music programming context. Many large organisations run web proxy software such as WebMarshal which, to quote their website : When a user on your network requests access to a web page, the request goes through WebMarshal. WebMarshal then checks the requested web page against a set of rules that you (the employer) define (your internet access policy). WebMarshal then scans the page for its content - viruses, profanity, appropriateness, b0mb making, adult themes etc - a whole host of things.. Then if the rules allow, and the user is allowed access, and if WebMarshal deems the page is "safe", WebMarshal fetches the page and sends it to the users browser. It does all this instantly and transparently to your users - affording them a safe Internet browsing experience. Some web proxy software decided that my article Harvard Radio treads where BBC fears t
Read more

The truth about those French orchestras

Image
My article reporting Claudio Abbado’s negative views on French orchestras certainly generated a lot of attention, including a response from Parisian Antoine Leboyer which corrected the myth that Abbado hadn’t actually conducted a French orchestra. Too much attention is given to British and American orchestras here On An Overgrown Path and elsewhere, and I was delighted when Antoine offered to give an inside view on the musical health of the French capital. So here is a guest blog from Paris with the truth about those French orchestras that Claudio Abbado and Daniel Harding love to hate: Let us put things in perspective with a few words on French orchestras. Abbado may not have had the best of experiences, and he may still not find it perfect today but things are improving. Paris has many orchestras (I do not know those outside Paris well, and cannot comment on them; I do have regards for the Lyon Orchestra which played some great concerts when David Robertson was their music direct
Read more

Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of his great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the château, the harpsichordist gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos below were taken by me on a
Read more