Bo Nilsson, Gyorgy Ligeti

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+

Among the more extraordinary pairings in the Caprice catalogue - and a document that illuminates, from opposite angles, the relationship between the European avant-garde and the instrumental tradition of the wind quintet. Bo Nilsson (1937-2018) was the most improbable figure in post-war Swedish music: largely self-taught, working from a small town in northern Sweden, he had burst onto the international new music scene in 1956 when his chamber works were performed at a WDR Musik der Zeit concert in Cologne and immediately attracted comparison with the Darmstadt circle. The comparison was, famously, based on a misunderstanding - Nilsson later admitted that his serialist-appearing scores were composed by ear, not by system - but the misunderstanding produced some of the most concentrated and original chamber writing of the 1950s avant-garde, before he turned, from the early 1960s, toward a freer and more cinematic language.

The three works here - Déjà vu, Déjà connu, and Déjà connu, déjà entendu - are late Nilsson: ruminative, atmospheric, the spiky pointillism of his earlier style now dissolved into something more diffuse and haunting. Paired with them, György Ligeti's Tio stycken för blåsarkvintett and Sex bagateller - both written in the late 1960s - offer the most searching exploration of what five wind instruments can become when each familiar gesture is subjected to precisely calibrated comic and formal distortion. The Stockholms Blåsarkvintett - Eje Kaufeldt, Bo Eriksson, Kjell Fagéus, Knut Sönstevold, Rolf Bengtsson - play both composers with complete authority. Caprice, CAP 1150.