This portrait CD has been long in coming, considering the importance of the composer’s oeuvre, though not large, relished as a bead of sharply chiseled compositions of uncompromising quality of a kind we find, sometimes, in this serious and somewhat melancholy realm of ours up in a Scandinavia with wintry jagged spruce forest horizons against bleak skies and lit-up street cars ambling through the streets of Norrköping.

This is also the latitude of darkness and light where we find the autodidacts, of which Lars-Åke Franke-Blom is one, even though he received some tuition from Daniel Börtz. It strengthens the impression I get of my own land as a roaming-ground for lonely wolfs and secret poets, making their desolate rounds from cafés to second-hand bookshops to libraries to forests to apartments to liqueur stores – with an occasional summer’s hike through the mountains of Lapland…

Oh, well, the above may be taking it a little out on a limb, because that is surely not the common atmosphere for artists of Sweden, but still, there is something here that throws me into associations of that kind, and when I hear clear echoes of Allan Pettersson not far into the first piece – Endymion -, this impression gains validity. A few minutes into Endymion you find these shrieking, intense strings in calls out of acute existential pain, like out of Pettersson’s famous 7th Symphony, and the percussiveness, with wood-blocks, kettle-drum etcetera further draws on this Pettersson association, as flutes rise in vain inside the density of the music in slender, dancing gestures, brutally crushed by the relentless force of the whole orchestra.

The poet Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793 – 1823) - not exactly a cheerful fellow, ugly and crooked… - wrote a poem about the handsome youngster Endymion, which provided Franke-Blom with the inspiration for his work, in which desire, sexual desire, is the main motif. The story, as almost always with Stagnelius, is a sad and hopeless one, wherein the sexual desire just makes things worse; impossible - as it always was - to satisfy, sublimated in yearning poems, as it were… (spider webs and moonlight, but no warm skin or rosy cheeks!)
The orchestral work based on this Endymion poem isn’t that pale, though, consumed by cold fire or fiery ice, but very coherent and consequential in its expressions, gearing up in silent, very silent beginnings, past the increasing tenseness of the Pettersson strings into the turmoil of the thunderous mid-section, later oozing down into a thoughtful, introverted and gradual diminuendo, in a deep consolation that Stagnelius for sure would have needed.

The second work on this CD is Längtans väv (Web of Yearning), a symphonic poem, considered one of Franke-Blom’s most significant works., which even won him a highly regarded 1st Prize at the American International New Music Composers Competition 1989/90. The competition grossed in excess of 500 works, so a first prize really meant something extra.
Franke-Blom’s hometown Norrköping in Sweden was formerly an important textile center, with large weaving mills right downtown; the buildings nowadays transformed into a cultural center. The area now hosts museums, a university and the concert hall where the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra has its home stage.
Web of Yearning portrays the historical. Textile aspect of the city, with sections called Calm Waters, Dark Masses of Water in Motion, Waterfall and Empty Industrial Buildings, The Machines are Started; Weaving and Looming, The Machines are Turned Off, Song Dedicated to the Workers, Demonstration and Fight for a Better World.
These indications almost, one would think, calls for an electroacoustic approach, but Franke-Blom paints in tonal colors of the orchestra alone.

The precarious beginning, street lights across the downtown river, the water flowing between humming turbines and generators, dark, ominous, forceful in a calm but fast drift… the source of wealth and despair, one of the arms of Moloch.
The music rapidly grows, encompassing large halls of working bodies, tending to the rushing of yarn through mechanical power-looms in 12-hour shifts, kids with runny noses at home, waiting for a wasted Mom in chilled-out coldwater flats, Father lost in the numbing consolation of alcohol, Lenin the one source of hope in a social system which crushed down hard on the common man in a surge of structural violence.

All these emotions are built in to this music by Franke-Blom, with inserted glimpses of the empty, black-windowed skeletons of post-textile days when Sweden was already far into the welfare state of Tage Erlander and Olof Palme, when the echoes of the looms were only heard inside the forlorn memories of old-timers stashed away in old-age homes, where the ghosts of mercantilism and industrialism were the only visitors as their children were swept away by the modern era and its digital desolation of self-righteousness, which is Moloch in just another disguise, the disperser of anguish… and even these more complex aspects seem to be woven into the strands of Franke-Blom’s Web of Yearning, which indeed proves to be a masterwork of sorts from my neighboring town. Towards the conclusion of this piece I even sense a kinship with the atmosphere in Jan W. Morthenson’s A la Marcia!
The deep murmurs of remorse and tired and weary muscles and eyes lead over into a kind of litany for the heart and soul of genuine, honest, hard work, and a slow chorale rises out of the brutal environment, slowly casting its almost heavenly light across these troubled masses of workers huddling in the cold of the wee hours of the morn, like the meek in disbelief appearing in front of the Throne in a scenery straight out of Gustavé Doré!
I salute Lars-Erik Franke-Blom for this outpour of musical genius!

Symphony 3, Fire on Earth, concludes the CD with its three parts Jakobs Traum, Elisabeth von Österreich and Voyage au bout de la nuit.
This symphony, allegedly, is inspired by paintings by Anselm Kiefer (b.1945 in Donaueschingen). The three sections of course borrow their names from Kiefer paintings.

One source says about Kiefer:

Another source:

Lars-Åke Franke-Blom has always had an inclination for the visual influences in his music. One of the first works I heard by Franke-Blom was a radio broadcast of a collection of chamber ensemble pieces to the art works of Max Book, Tom Krestensen, Ulf Trotzig, Peter Duke, Maia Eintzin, Franco Lady, Urban Engström, Martin Engström and perhaps some others. It was broadcast on Swedish radio the 6th of July 1993, and I was up front with my tape recorder!

Fire on Earth starts like Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony, strangely enough, and the romanticism hangs on for a while, as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Richard Strauss... Wagner even, peer out from the wings…
Ballet-like inklings seep out of the 19th century into the first movement of the symphony. It is peculiar how easily Franke-Blom takes these atmospheric citations in his hand and redistributes them into his own web of timbres and pitches. I discern a mighty sweep of intuition in these gestures of homage, like in all really good art.
Soon, though, the temper changes, grows feverish, dense, insisting, in musical lashes-outs that will not take no for an answer, and I sense a multitude of helmets, row after row, down the trenches of world wars…
This music is so scenic, indeed so visual, that I would not be surprised if it would be utilized in films in the future.
I hear, or think I hear, some hints at the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony Pathetique, and just the thought of that music brings on a certain feeling of endless human despair, as the fogs gather across the trenches and battle fields of the world, where only a lonely blackbird sings hesitatingly in the silence after the storm…

There are moments in the second part, Elisabeth von Österreich, that reveal such an overwhelming serenity of beauty that it becomes almost unbearable, the fragility of the suspense of light hanging in a trembling succession along the duration of the piece. Masterly!

The last movement of Fire on Earth is again a wilder, Allan Pettersson-like jumble of tightly gathered and densely dispersed timbres, pitches, rhythms, at times easing out in long, held tones around which musical gestures in different instruments spiral, until Franke-Blom calls everyone to their battle stations again, for the fateful final ending. There is an amazing power collected in this concluding piece.

There is truly a silver lining around the life’s work of Lars-Åke Franke-Blom. This portrait CD proves it beyond all doubt! Congratulations!