Jan Carlstedt, Sven-Erik Bäck, Lars Johan Werle

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (sticker removal residue on front)

Three Swedish composers, three works, and a rare Rikskonserter pressing that documents one of the most fertile periods in Swedish chamber music - the years in which the generation formed by Hilding Rosenberg and shaped by post-war European developments had found its own distinctive voices. Jan Carlstedt (1926-2001) was a composer of quietly rigorous chamber music whose String Quartet No. 2 Op. 22 - presented here - became one of the most admired works in its genre to emerge from Sweden in this period: a work of modal intensity and formal clarity whose apparent remove from the heated language of the Darmstadt mainstream was itself a considered position, not an evasion.

Sven-Erik Bäck (1919-1994) had studied with Rosenberg and subsequently in Rome with Petrassi, and brought to Swedish new music a combination of contrapuntal discipline and expressive directness that had few parallels among his contemporaries. Favola - fable - is one of his most characteristic chamber works: a piece that uses the resources of the string ensemble to tell, without words, something that has the shape and the moral weight of a story. Lars Johan Werle (1926-2001) is best known for his opera Drömspelet (1964), but his chamber writing - represented here by Pentagram - belongs to the same imagination: richly dramatic, attentive to the relationship between musical structure and theatrical time. Rikskonserter / Expo Norr, RIKS LP 18.