Berwald Orchestral Works – Sakari

Somebody, someday, is going to program a Berwald symphony next to the Symphonie fantastique and the penny will drop for a whole audience at once. Until then we get these stray orchestral works, dutifully excavated by Naxos and by a Swedish orchestra most of us couldn’t place on a map — Gävle sits a couple hours north of Stockholm, on the Gulf of Bothnia, and its band plays with the earnest competence of a group that knows it is, for many listeners, the only advocate this repertoire will ever get.

That’s a burden. Berwald deserves better than dutiful.

He was a strange bird by any measure: trained as a violinist, unable to get his major works performed in Stockholm, decamping to Berlin and Vienna to run, of all things, an orthopedic institute and later a glassworks, composing symphonies that wouldn’t reach the concert hall for decades. The four symphonies are the real Berwald. Next to them these shorter pieces can feel like sketches for a language he was still inventing. But the fingerprints are already there: the abrupt tonal ambush, the way a phrase seems to trip over its own downbeat and land somewhere unexpected. It’s not quite Mendelssohn’s elfin scherzo-world and not quite Berlioz’s idée fixe obsessiveness, though both hover nearby. Berwald’s is a colder, more northern nervousness — the orchestration thinner, the harmonic surprises less lush, more angular, almost Nielsen-ish before Nielsen existed.

Reminiscence of the Norwegian Mountains opens with exactly that spaciousness you’d want: horns and strings breathing out over long pedals, the air practically thinning at altitude. Sakari lets it unfold without fuss. Then the piece accelerates into one of those characteristic Berwald games of chicken with the barline, triplets and duplets shouldering past each other, and here the Gävle players start to sound like they’re reading a road they’ve only driven once. It’s not disastrous. It’s just not quite inside the music yet. The ensemble tightens rather than swings, and the exhilarating near-collision Berwald wants comes off politely negotiated instead.

Wettlauf — “the race” — needs a devil-may-care abandon that never quite arrives. The woodwind chatter in the introduction wants Mercury-quick reflexes; what we get instead are entrances a hair late, a sixteenth-note figure that doesn’t quite mesh with the strings underneath, the whole texture sounding faintly damp rather than combustible. Ulf Björlin’s older EMI traversal, fuller-bodied and more confidently drilled, doesn’t solve every problem either — his fugal writing in Elfenspiel starts just as tentatively — but there’s a tonal richness to that Stockholm-based effort that Gävle can’t match. Call it a wash: neither version is the Elfenspiel of your dreams, though dream performances of Berwald barely exist on disc at all.

Ernste und heitere Grillen — “serious and merry whims,” a title that could serve as Berwald’s epitaph — fares best of the character pieces here, mostly because its rhythmic profile is less treacherous, easier for an orchestra to inhabit without flinching. There’s real charm in the woodwind solos, some nicely turned oboe work catching the “heitere” side of the ledger.

The disc’s genuine discovery is the Konzertstück for bassoon. Here everything clicks. Composed in 1828, decades before Berwald found his mature voice, it’s Weimar-Classical in cut but already impatient with convention: what sounds like it’s settling in for a conventional orchestral ritornello gets hijacked, almost rudely, by a single bassoon entrance sitting right in that reedy, vocal upper-middle register where the instrument sings best. Patrick Håkansson has the tone for it — burnished, never comic, phrasing the lyrical stretches with a singer’s sense of line rather than the honking oom-pah caricature bassoonists sometimes can’t resist. It’s a small, generous piece, a cousin to Weber’s concerto but with a wit that’s entirely its own, and Håkansson and Sakari give it the interpretation of the disc.

The Overture to Drottningen av Golconda closes matters with theatrical swagger. Berwald wrote a fair amount for the stage that nobody stages, and this one at least suggests he had a dramatist’s instinct for pacing, even if the opera itself vanished almost on arrival.

So: a useful disc, not a great one. Sakari’s Gävle band plays with evident affection and only intermittent security; anyone wanting fireworks in the symphonies should look instead to Neeme Järvi’s Gothenburg cycle, which remains the best entry point into this composer’s larger world. But for the Konzertstück alone — a genuine rarity, beautifully played — this disc earns its shelf space. Berwald still awaits the advocacy he deserves. This is a down payment, not the full account.