If von Otter’s and Forsberg’s intention in compiling this recital was to provide an introduction to the riches of Swedish song so compelling that purchasers of it will hunger for more, they have succeeded. There are very few songs here that could not be programmed without apology or fear of comparison alongside the best German Lieder of the same period (the 40 years between 1884 and 1924). They have considerable variety of mood and musical style, and the recital has been cleverly programmed to demonstrate in particular the range and the development of the two finest song composers here, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger and Wilhelm Stenhammar. Both were greatly gifted melodists, Peterson-Berger holding to an almost folk-like vein of simple lyricism, while Stenhammar reached further and touched darker moods. But Peterson-Berger’s Op. 12 can encompass a quite haunting song of quiet, contented love as well as sharply witty peasant tale-telling, and his avowedly folk-like early songs have real depth of feeling to them: the grief of a bereaved lover in Like stars in the heavens is all the more poignant for being so simply expressed. Stenhammar can use a similar simplicity – in the tenderly consolatory In the maple’s shade, for example – but can also rise to almost epic balladry in the dramatic and very striking Miss Blonde and Miss Brunette and intensify the darkness of Coastal song by casting it as a set of variations on a two-bar phrase, like an idea of death of which the mind cannot rid itself.

The other composers here are by no means cast into the shade by these two masters. Ture Rangstrom ranges widely, from the declamatory boldness of Wings in the night to the casting of a quiet, hypnotic spell in Pan. Sigurd von Koch is good at spells, too – Spring night’s rain is a hushed and delicate example – but his grimly pessimistic Mankind’s lot is a powerful dark saying. The depth of feeling of Hugo Alfven’s I kiss your hand (not a love song but a protesting premonition of death) will surprise those who know only his jolly Midsummer Vigil. The only derivative songs here, quite strongly indebted to Liszt, are those by Emil Sjogren, but their melodies are fresh and ardent.

The performances are superb, quiet shadings of colour and subtle phrasings under immaculate control, a mere thread of voice often used to draw you into the heart of a song quite magically. Forsberg is an ideally imaginative and positive partner. I have now played several of these songs over and over again (for von Otter’s exquisite little flourish of coloratura at the end of von Koch’s Of lotus scent, for example, or for her delightful touch of humour and affection describing little chicks “who can hardly walk” stumbling into the first warm sun of summer in the first of Peterson-Berger’s Marit’s Songs). None of them have yet staled; I think that few of them will.

-- Michael Oliver, Gramophone [5/1996]