Martin Sturfält - Wlihelm Stenhammar: Piano Music (2008)

In the contest to see which Scandinavian country produced the best fin de siècle composer, Norway has Grieg, Denmark has Nielsen, Finland has Sibelius, and Sweden has Alfvén and Stenhammar. Needless to say, Grieg, Nielsen, and Sibelius are all vastly better known to non-Scandinavian audiences than Alfvén and especially Stenhammar. After all, Alfvén at least has the once popular Swedish Rhapsody to his credit, while Stenhammar is barely a name outside his own country.

Still, for those who sought out the Swedish recordings of his works, Stenhammar proved a nearly great composer of symphonies, concertos, and string quartets whose music sounds more like Brahms than Wagner and more like him than anybody else. This 2008 Hyperion disc by pianist Martin Sturfält features some of his best and most characteristic piano music: two large-scale sonatas, plus his Nights of Late Summer and Three Fantasies. The G minor and A flat major sonatas are big-boned, serious works in the grand manner, while the Nights and the Fantasies are expressive and sensuous works in the salon manner. All four works receive convincing performances by Sturfält, who clearly has the virtuoso technique, the nuanced tone, and the subtle understanding needed to make Stenhammar's music work. Here, Stenhammar's sonatas may sound a bit like latter-day Brahms and the Nights and Fantasies may sound at times like latter-day Chopin, but all four are imbued with a directness of expression and an intensity of utterance that are the entire composer's own. While longtime Stenhammar aficionados may already have the excellent recordings of his complete piano work on BIS by Lucia Negro, anyone dipping into these pieces for the first time may want to try this single disc before diving in head first. Hyperion's sound is a tad dry, but very clear and very, very vivid. -- James Leonard