Wilhelm Stenhammar occupies one of those awkward positions in music history — too good to ignore, not famous enough to be taken for granted. His Swedish contemporaries Peterson-Berger and Alfvén found their audiences domestically, the former through songs and piano miniatures, the latter through the kind of vivid orchestral color that travels well. Stenhammar’s music is harder. It asks more. The G minor symphony, the Serenade for orchestra, the Second Piano Concerto, the six string quartets — these are works a listener has to grow into, and the growing takes time.
Which makes the piano music something of a special case. Not because it’s easier, exactly, but because it’s intimate in a way his larger works aren’t. And there isn’t much of it. Stenhammar was a formidable pianist — he premiered his own Second Concerto, and his chamber performances with the Aulin Quartet were legendary in Stockholm — yet he wrote for the instrument sparingly. The three fantasies and the set of five pieces called Sensommarnätter represent essentially his entire mature contribution to the solo piano repertoire, and they fit comfortably on a single disc.
Cassandra Wyss gives us all of it.
The fantasies owe obvious debts — Brahms in the harmonic weight, Schumann in the impulsive formal freedom — but they don’t sound like either. Stenhammar’s voice was already his own. The first fantasy, marked Molto appassionato, is the best known, and Wyss plays it with genuine fire and a clarity of line that keeps the passion from curdling into rhetoric. The fingerwork is clean even when the dynamics surge, and she never lets the climaxes sprawl.
Where she runs into trouble is the second fantasy, Dolce scherzando. Her reading clocks in at just over six minutes — Mats Widlund, on the competing Musica Sveciae disc, dispatches it in just over four, and doesn’t sound remotely hurried. The difference matters, because the piece depends on lightness. Wyss emphasizes dolce when the music really asks for scherzando — the result is something too ruminative, a nocturne where a scherzo should be. The third fantasy, Molto espressivo e con intimissimo, is a different story. Here her deliberate pacing, the heavier rubatos, the willingness to let phrases breathe and darken — all of it serves the music. Widlund’s account has a more natural conversational flow, but Wyss finds something genuinely brooding that he doesn’t quite reach.
Sensommarnätter — Late Summer Nights — is stranger and more elusive than the fantasies. Stenhammar wrote these pieces well before their 1914 publication date, probably around 1901, and they seem to exist in a harmonic world adjacent to Grieg’s late piano pieces and early Debussy without really belonging to either. The first and third pieces are reflective, almost melancholy — the kind of music that suggests twilight without describing it. The second, Poco presto, has a restlessness to it, something autumnal and faintly ominous, like weather changing on an August afternoon. Wyss plays it with appropriate urgency, the articulation crisp and forward-moving.
Sweden has not been well served in the international recording catalogs, and Stenhammar least of all. That this music remains largely unfamiliar outside Scandinavia is a genuine cultural loss — not a charming curiosity, but a loss. Wyss is not always the most idiomatic guide, and Widlund remains the touchstone for the fantasies. But she is a serious artist bringing serious attention to music that deserves it. That counts.
