Is Lars-Åke Franke-Blom a Vilhelm Ekelund of contemporary Swedish music? I many ways I think he is. Some may say, that to compose music like Vilhelm Ekelund wrote his aphorisms, you’d have to write music like Bo Nilsson. I understand the objection, if you look only at the crystal clarity of Ekelund’s thinking and the etched content of his manuscripts, but in Ekelund there always was a dangerous withheld storm of emotions, vividly obvious in his poems from 1900 – 1906 but also as a backdrop to his later aphorisms, which, channeled through his intense discipline, produced these sharp thoughts in perfect equilibrium – and we cannot forget his romantic base in pre-Socrats like Pindar and his domiciliary rights in the April freshness of the Anemone Hepaticas that he felt related to right across the species.
Franke-Blom reveals, through his diligent compositions over the decades, that he also has both traits; the depth of ominously strong emotions as well as the Apollonian clarity and transparence of soaring thought structures; in the best sense an intellectual with very strong feelings.

Vilhelm Ekelund (1880 – 1949), from the posthumous book Campus et Dies (1963), aphorism 39:

(Reviewer’s note: I will not attempt to interpret Ekelund’s aphorisms in English. Ekelund’s writing is too delicate and intricate, words often expressing Ekelund’s own significance or shade of them, making a translation all but impossible, and most surely quite dangerous…)

Franke-Blom said about his Cello Concerto, at the time of its premier on 24th March 1979 in Norrköping, Sweden:

As you can see from the programme, the arrangers of the concert in 1979 saw it fit to place Franke-Blom’s premier of his Cello Concerto in amongst works by J. S. Bach, Claude Debussy and Franz Schubert:

In Lars-Åke Franke-Blom’s Cello Concerto I recall the feelings of my 19th year, when I was studying at the folk high school of Jära, a boarding school outside Nässjö in the Småland district of Sweden, spending late nights in the large assembly room at the bottom floor of the castle-like house of the boys’ dormitory Mossebo. I was alone there most nights, sitting in one of the comfortable, old-style armchairs by one of the tables, sipping strong coffee, smoking my pipe, studying Vilhelm Ekelund’s books, which I had bought in antiquarian bookstores, and the room had a distinct scent of the apples of fall. The deep window-recesses amplified the olden feeling of a castle.
At Jära, in my late adolescence, I entered the most sensitive and fine-tuned time of my life through Vilhelm Ekelund’s aphorisms; a time of life, which now, in retrospect, appears like a lost golden age to me, in an intense transparence, which nowadays only occurs in my dreams at times…

Vilhelm Ekelund from Campus et Dies, aphorism 99:

With a mournful feeling, almost as strong as in the first section of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony, and in that same trembling murmur, Lars-Åke Franke-Blom’s Cello Concerto commences with the solo cello right up front. The recording from 1979 is surprisingly accurate, clean-cut and clear, vibrant with the dynamics, as the mighty tone grows and shivers, oscillating right in front of you. The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation had shown up for the Norrköping concert, to record it, which may explain this brilliant sound of a live concert.

You may want to compare this cello sound to what you’ve heard in other cello concerts, and you may find analogies too, as Franke-Blom isn’t afraid of lining up in a classic tradition, but you will soon realize, too, that he has his own voice, his own color of tone and manner of scoring.
It is romantic, like he has said himself; very much so. I can see him with his pen, leaning over the score as it emerges, the paper lit up by a table lamp, smoke from his pipe rising in garlands up into the near-darkness under the roof. It’s a romantic vision of a classical composer, a classic intellectual, and I think it fits Franke-Blom well, especially in his younger years. I can sense this quality in this music, which leaves no doubt as to the Sturm-und-Drang source of its manifestation.

The dark sound of the cello wanders the shadows in deep thoughts, aimlessly across the perimeter of the sounding space, as other string instruments merge almost imperceptibly with it, adding to it and diluting it some, rendering the dark brooding some lighter timbres, until the cello vanishes completely, leaving this layer of soaring, winding strings to hover in lighter tonal hues, but still in emotions of remorse and weariness.

Vilhelm Ekelund; Jag diktar för ingen from Havets Stjärna (1906):

A piccolo flute (?) breaks off the melancholy inwardness with a piercing tone pointing up ahead, like a psychotherapist going into the dark landscapes of a soul lost to mourning to show the way out into the light of life once more…
Some rattling percussion and a returning, fierce cello whip up a storm och feelings, the tempo picking up, the complexity of the music increasing in fast measures.

As this goes on the music moves into a more contemporary area of the score, and perhaps this is one of Franke-Blom’s greater contributions; the visualization of the lineage from tradition to the modern in the music – and his way of fearlessly mixing those aspects in a music of his own.

Percussion and wind dance in wide circles by themselves for a while, until a lenient cello joins them in a winding melody that slowly rises and floats about above the stage. In the background a thin curtain of strings soar like mist.

This is relieved by more erratic, jerky passages, wherein the instruments talk and grunt amongst each other like cattle in a barn, in a Tomas Tranströmer setting…

Then a single, stretched tone of the cello is allowed to extend itself in a fragility of line, to speak with violinist and experimentalist Malcolm Goldstein from Vermont and Montreal. The tone trembles and wobbles and grows, picking up timbres on the way, echoing in the ambience of the concert hall (Hörsalen, Norrköping, Sweden), coming across in a peculiar, austere statement of laconic urgency! After a brutal stop, the most tender and soft string music pours out, like a fondling hand stroking your cheek right after slapping you hard!

A violin in an elastic bowing suddenly makes me think of some pieces by Arvo Pärt, and the orchestra starts sounding like The Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra under Juha Kangas! Franke-Blom’s music goes through remarkable transformations.

A sudden, violent explosion sets the cello off in a thudding, bouncing motion, in the style of Italian contrabassist Stefano Scodanibbio, evolving into brief references to Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1.

With about ten minutes to go the instruments of the orchestra seem to be in some kind of deliberation, from which they return in loud voices and snappy gestures, in some way intoxicated, if only by ideas and ideals…
The cello can be detected from inside the dense grove of the orchestra, in a camaraderie of the noble with the commons.

Abruptly, though, the cello gets into a frenzy, climbing up the pitches, screaming at the top of its voice, desperately trying to be a viola… until stepping down a bit, bringing the massive force of the orchestra with it in a tour-de force, which in turn – after just a short instance – stops dead in suspended silence… where after the cello speaks in its more common, more recognizable darker voice, by itself, pondering the circumstances in a slow, stooping figure…

It is amazing though – and worth great attention – how Franke-Blom, right here in this part, through just a few bars, from 19:30 to about 19:50 into the recording, lets the cello change emotions from dark brooding to a more hopeful, almost lighthearted state of mind!

Vilhelm Ekelund from Campus et Dies, aphorism 442:

When the orchestra joins in after this change of mood in the soloist cello, it paints with sweeping, dawning colors, light spreading over the plains, like film music at the declaration of a happy-end, or like the soulful breath of relief when the power of love fills your mind with insight… and Franke-Blom sounds like one of the British composers right here, like, maybe Ralph Vaughan Williams or… Benjamin Britten!

An ascending-descending-ascending glissando leads over into a urgently reasoning part in the solo cello, quietly calming down into a meditative state of fragmented thoughts and short pauses, into which at one point a little child’s voice from the audience enters, beautifully!

For a while here the cello is let alone, undisturbed by the orchestra, in an atmosphere of the chamber music of Moishei Vainberg, the lesser known friend of Dmitry Shostakovich, and the immediate feeling is that of sitting on a wooden pier, feet dangling, calls of seagulls in the fog further out, the engine of a fishing boat from a far distance, thumping like the heart of the matter…
This is the most brilliantly beautiful passage, and the way the orchestra almost indiscernibly joins the lone cello is a mastery of composition and a mastery of playing! The soaring, hovering layer of string timbres emits an air of enchantedness, giving the listener a glimpse into some forlorn, distant realm of existence, where the child that was you still plays among the cows or in the forest, hiding away his thoughts like gems while the wind whispers in the spruce trees and the clouds of summer drift on high…

A heightened energy is injected by the orchestra acting in a percussive manner, in joint percussive exclamations, as the texture once more is getting denser, more energetic and full, but never getting fierce or hectic, remaining withheld and restrained until stillness spreads like dusk, the orchestration thinning out into a meditative transparence that is comforting the mind until all sounds winds down into… silence…

Vilhelm Ekelund from Campus et Dies, aphorism 469: