Let me say this: There are only two things – really just two! – that I don’t like about this issue, and the first is the fact that they’ve used the same pictures to illustrate both the Swedish and the English text in the booklet (which, by the way, is more like a book). Textbook editors usually – all the time, as far as I can recall – take the chance to get as many different pictures in as possible, and that does make sense. Even if you can’t read one or the other language, you can always flip through and look at the pictures. The second thing I don’t like is that – in spite of all the work they must have put into proof-reading and proof-reading again, an example of the ugliest and – sad to say – most common grammatical error of our day (on account of the prevalent and undesired American influx) shows up in the contents leaflet concerning CD 2, track 2, where Berwaldkvartetten is spelled “Berwald kvartetten”, the English way; The Berwald Quartet, with a division between the words…

That really is to tell you how minor and insignificant my objections are to this grand Åke Hermanson release from Caprice. It is a wonderful double-CD to come out of the Caprice vaults, concerning the content as well as the form, which is to say that the looks of the set is extremely appealing too, in color and general design. Just holding this box in your hands and looking at it says a lot about the music and the cultural/human atmosphere in which the music was written. It’s very rare for a recording company to try this hard and also succeed this well. It’s a masterly concept from A to Z.

I have to mention some of the people involved in this valuable and so rich release, because they deserve some credit. Let’s start with the design, which really gets you right into the atmosphere, before you even start listening. Graphic designer is Sofia Berry. Keep her on the payroll, Caprice! Britt Hermanson took the cover photo, so that is a family picture, I suppose. It’s a bit blurry, which the photographer probably didn’t like at the time, but on the cover of the box it’s a perfect image. I have to congratulate whoever chose that shot; maybe Sofia Berry again! Marie Wisén is the editor. Marie Wisén is also the executive producer in collaboration with Kjell Söderqvist. Those guys have turned out a lot of good stuff on Caprice, but this time they’ve outdone themselves. It is an important production for Swedish culture as a whole; one of those milestones. The liner notes are exemplary and in depth, by Maestro Göran Bergendal, who has a long life in music to his credit. We’ve had our differences, but I know a masterwork when I see one, and his research, choice of inclusions and liner notes make this double-CD a treasure! It is also noteworthy that Bergendal has managed to fill both CDs to the rim! The English translation by Isabel Thomson is impeccable and gallantly flowing – except for once, when she says “complaint” instead of “lament”... and another time, when she fails to give The Music School of Stockholm its upper-case first letters… Also, as a matter of taste, I prefer the word “shores” instead of “beaches”.

The box also contains a complete work list, which makes an inquisitive music lover extra content.

Here’s the content on these two discs:

In this text I will listen through just a few of all these compositions, which, however, all are worthy of in depth listening, engulfing you in an atmosphere of someone who takes life seriously while also allowing his thoughts to soar on the salty Westerleys like gulls, contemplating the whetted rocks and the storm-ridden shores of existence, achieving in music what Vilhelm Ekelund (1880 – 1949) practiced in his poems, wherein the landscape represented emotions and psychological states, in delicate nuances of human experiences.

Åke Hermanson made his debut as a composer in 1951, comparably late. He was 28. He was born on the Swedish West Coast, on the island of Orust. This is a rugged, wind-torn coast, open to the western winds and the storms from the North Sea, and the weather fronts parading in from the British Isles, in curtains of rain.

Hermanson’s childhood home was religious and musical. The family owned a piano, and Åke Hermanson learned how to play it early in life. In addition, he played the organ and the accordion as well. In his teens he was engaged to play the organ in a local church om Sundays.

He met his wife-to-be early. Already at the age of 16 he used to attend concerts with her in Gothenburg, especially impressed by Beethoven and Sibelius, but he also acquainted himself with contemporary music, personified through Lars-Erik Larsson, Gösta Nystroem and, more than the others, Hilding Rosenberg.

As the 2^nd World War drew to a close in 1945, Åke Hermanson initiated his formal musical studies. He was 22. He began piano and organ studies, eventually, in 1947, studying organ with the renowned organist Alf Linder, and musical theory with the well-known Henry Lindroth. In 1950 he began studying with Hilding Rosenberg.

His compositional debut came in 1951, with Prelude & Fugue for organ, which was premiered in 1952 by none other than Bengt Hambraeus. The version included in this Caprice issue was recorded in 1996 by Erik Boström.
Bergendal calls this piece objective, impartial (“saklig”, in Swedish) – and maybe it is. It offers a full and saturated sound at times, while otherwise fingering about cautiously, in sparse and forlorn thoughts up spiral mind-frames, through stern and granite-like circumstances; blue violets growing in the cracks on the inland side of rocks battered by a raging sea. Mighty, somehow trustworthy music, and with a stamina of tough and stubborn aging: old fishermen mending their nets on benches facing the North Sea; their skin leathery.

The flute and viola duet A due voci from 1958 is a lyrical and a little hoarse tune, meandering in lucid air, the flute resounding inside a rich overtone haze of extraneous airflow sonorities, grounding the lyricism in a healthy humus of day-to-day life, of practicality in an atmosphere of dreams and hopes. I really like this combination of instruments, which go so well together. It wouldn’t have been at all the same with a violin, for example. The alto touch of the viola makes all the difference here.
The atmosphere is serene, melancholy but also proud and persuasive; a dream dreamt in a feeling of self-worth and compassion.
I can clearly envision a ballet in this music; motions of respectful passion penned down with a pencil on wrapping paper while the wind blows and the sun peek-a-boos through shreds of clouds!

Symphony No. 1 opens in dark earth colors, the double basses looming like ominous clouds in late fall, when the ground is thick with moldering organic matter, and human emotions wrap a coat of survival determination and long plans around themselves.

Not many composers can achieve this grave, low-flying motion through the underbrush of life, throw the lower chakras, save for some of the Russians and our own Allan Pettersson – and I believe Allan Pettersson is the one I think most of, in an associative sense, when I place this Åke Hermanson symphony in my sensory archive of musical experiences.
The first movement grows into thick layers of gallantly mastered orchestral sonorities, wherein the dark streaks are dominant, though, like overtones; like silhouettes of lost loved ones, the higher pitches of the other strings and the woodwinds soar on high.
The massive motion of the totality of sound is impressive, to understate it. This music is devastating, wonderfully devastating – and it’s one of the favorite conductors of my own youth (spent by the radio and in concert halls) who conducts here; Antal Dorati. Just seeing his name printed in the booklet instills intense feelings of artistic bliss in me. You know, your senses are the most sensitive in your youth and adolescence, and, besides Karajan and Celibidache, Dorati was my hero! He plays the orchestra with his intensely focused mind here, like was it hooked up directly to his intentions: nothing is lost. I feel like I’m standing in front of a dark oil in the dusk of an art museum, the light of day suddenly breaking and entering, providing me with a total experience; an essence of… of what? Of Life, of Hope, of Dreams; those dreams that carry us ever further on ahead, into love, into space, into lives to follow.

Åke Hermanson’s Symphony No. 1, finished in 1967 (when Allan Pettersson worked on his amazing breakthrough 7th Symphony, recorded in 1969 by Antal Dorati and the Stockholm Philharmonics!) doesn’t leave me indifferent. It has a profound effect on the rest of my day – and I will return to it now and again, when I need to accentuate my feelings, when I need to breathe deep inside the loneliness in which we all live, from which we all signal. Hermanson’s Symphony No. 1 is a signal from within that basic loneliness; a flaming beacon on top a granite rock of Bohuslän, calling the attention of seafarers in the dark. And the above was just after listening to Movement 1 out of the 4 of the symphony.

Appell I – IV per orchestra is a lively, rhythmic and percussive, organized turmoil of feverish events, stacked, one upon the other in a heated discussion of orchestral groups! Wow! That’s how I perceive the beginning of the work, in which strings in the higher pitches cut through the air like swords of samurais! Appell I is has the indication “rapidamente”, and it does move in hasty staccato blocks of orchestral sounds, like nagging exclamations at a breakfast table in a family bound for imminent divorce! The music has a definite taste of Bartók in the percussive rhythmizations.

That impression is even more evident in Appell II; “risoluto”. Here the percussion and the glissanding brass march in a stuttering staccato swirl through Bartók land, especially when you hear wood blocks and piano at play. Engaging! Can’t sit still!

Appell III – “articolazione” - retains the wood blocks and the sharp, incising metal percussion, but otherwise it’s a slower, much slower progression of… yes, well articulated statements! It keeps building up into minor scherzi, receding into less aggressive incidents, only to gather frenzy again and stack things on top of each other until it cracks and dissipates, and finally recedes altogether.

Appell IV – “prestissimo fremente” – makes transparent use of percussion to begin with, later adding bass drum a few times, as the strings and the brass congest to cause havoc and more turmoil. You don’t want to get in the way of this frantic bunch! Hermanson must have had really fun writing and rehearsing this, and I bet Stig Westerberg and The Swedish Radio Symphony had a field day too! Everything happens so fast and so much and is so intricate and complex that it must be an almost unbearable feat to keep it all together, bursting at its seems as it is!

Åke Hermanson appreciated the poetry of Karl Vennberg very much, and approached Vennberg in late 1960, or early 1961, to ask permission to set music to the poet's Stadier (Stages). He got the permission and composed the music for soprano, flute, bass clarinet, viola and percussion. The work comes in six movements, but held together on just one track on the CD.

Starting on a rolling drum, the bass clarinet gears up in thoughtful figures, joined and seconded by the flute, and as the instruments talk in each others’ mouths, Ilona Maros enters in her virtuoso soprano part, her voice glaring and shining like the first rays of morning sunlight hitting snowy summits. The instrumental ensemble still moves about in the shadow lands of the valleys, and in the houses the inhabitants are still sleeping inside their bodies. Hermanson’s set of songs somehow come across like a melodrama, not unlike a couple of Sven-Erik Bäck’s works: Tranfjädrarna (The Crane Feathers) and Fågeln (The Bird). Hermanson’s work has that same enchanted sense about it; this feeling of magic so well represented by Ilona Maros’ glowing vocal trajectories on the backdrop of ominous black spheres of drums hammering and the rest of the ensemble painting calligraphic messages from the gods on the horizon.

Suoni d’un flauto is just that; the sound of a flute – but how intriguing this composition is, how invoking, and how masterly Alf Andersen plays his transverse flute!
This long flute solo emits golden garlands of good but mysterious intentions, like some young goddess performing a dance all by herself on a distant shore inside someone’s consciousness. It’s so inspiring, in a cool, distant (in time, in space) way; a frantic but amazingly transparent arguing with oneself over some crucial decision that has to be made – but in the understanding that the enactment of that decision will take place only in the illusive material dream world, as a kind of theater or demonstration of the real world; the spiritual world. A recording that is a sonic and artistic treasure!

Mässa för måsar sports an ear-pleasing M – M alliteration in Swedish. Mass for Gulls! A wonderful thought, bringing lofty visions of white birds soaring the salty breezes above windswept ocean expanses; gulls soaring and hovering like unselfish thoughts in the mind of the righteous.
The work is written for mixed choir, and the strange aspect of it all is that Åke Hermanson wrote the musical setting of Ebba Lindqvist’s existential poem (printed in its entirety in the booklet) without much prior knowledge of choir writing. That explains why Hermanson penned his score more in an orchestral hue and context than a choral one; thus – unexpectedly – achieving one of his most original and appealing sonic results.

Ebba Lindqvist’s poem has an uncanny depth and width, opening the coast line, opening the immensity of oceanic expanses, opening the shivering mysteries of space-time existence and beyond, and I wish very much that I could walk amongst the readers of this text and read Mass for Gulls out aloud to you.

Here is my English interpretation of the Swedish poem:

The choir extends in layers and strata; vocal inversion layers of cool evenings as the sun sets; angelic overtone speech out of Cirrus and Altocumulus; those voices of unseen spiritual beings that arrive glaring like visual disturbances in the corner of the eye as the air freshens towards night, and you return home with your body, certain of a meaning of it all, of a mission and a destiny – and with the wonderfully aching belief that nothing, absolutely nothing, is in vain. Mass for Gulls!

I will end my written encounters with the works on this amazing Åke Hermanson double-CD from Caprice Records here, but I’ll go on listening for long yet! As much as this release brings back atmospheres from my years in secondary grammar school in the early Sixties, with the smell of chalk and marble steps, and the fragrance of old leather volumes in the school library, it also makes me remember so well my musical heroes of my teens, like Antal Dorati, Stig Westerberg and many more – but the most amazing thing is that, apart from that obvious sensation, these works have an impact in my contemporary world as well, perhaps even more, with all those years added to the duration of my own existence. A truly wonderful double-CD with exemplary documentation and a lust-for-the-eye design!