Atterberg Symphonies by Järvi and Gothenburg Symphony

Kurt Atterberg spent most of his professional life as a patent clerk. That fact alone tells you something — not about his talent, which was genuine, but about the particular Swedish pragmatism that shaped his music. He never romanticized the artist’s garret. He went to work, he came home, he composed.

What Neeme Järvi and the Gothenburg Symphony have done here is make a persuasive case that the neglect of this music is a kind of cultural accident rather than a verdict. Järvi knows this repertoire from the inside — Scandinavian late Romanticism is practically native ground for him — and the Gothenburgers play with an ease and warmth that suggests genuine affection rather than dutiful regionalism.

Start with the Symphony No. 6 in c major, op. 31, the so-called Dollar Symphony. The backstory is irresistible: in 1928, the year of Schubert’s centenary, Columbia Records offered $10,000 — a staggering prize — for the best new symphony honoring Schubert’s lyric legacy. Atterberg won it outright, and promptly bought a sports car. Scandinavian papers crowed; international critics howled. Some accused him of deliberate pastiche, of gaming a competition whose terms practically demanded it. The accusation is not entirely without merit. There are moments — the long-breathed second theme of the first movement, certain woodwind colorings in the slow movement — where Schubert’s shadow falls quite deliberately across the page. But the work has more spine than its detractors admitted. The finale builds with genuine cumulative force, and Atterberg’s orchestration, always his strongest suit, glitters here without merely glittering. Järvi keeps the momentum honest. He doesn’t sentimentalize the lyrical passages or inflate the climaxes, and the result is a symphony that earns its twenty-seven minutes.

The Sinfonia piccola, Symphony No. 4, op. 14, is a different and in some ways more interesting case. It was composed under self-imposed constraints — a friendly wager with the composer Natanael Berg: write a piece under twenty minutes, and feature the tuba. Atterberg reached for Swedish folk material he had known since boyhood, and the result is episodic in a way that is partly charming and partly problematic. The outer movements clatter along with an almost aggressive energy — there’s bombast there, no question — but the slow movement is something else entirely. It has a quality of stillness, of listening inward, that you don’t expect from the brash opening. The tuba, for what it’s worth, shows up dutifully, though one suspects even Atterberg knew it had been invited to the party rather than given reason to be there.

Suite No. 3, op. 19, no. 1, began as incidental music for Maeterlinck’s Soeur Béatrice — a play about a nun who abandons her vows, not exactly light entertainment, and the music reflects that. Atterberg originally wrote for violin, viola, and harmonium, the thinness of the scoring presumably forced on him by practical circumstance. In the version heard here, with Sara Trobäck Hesselink and Per Högberg as the soloists and strings filling the harmonium’s role, the three movements acquire a translucent melancholy that suits the subject. Hesselink plays with real finesse — her tone in the middle movement has a threading, interior quality, never pushed — and Högberg matches her with viola playing of warmth and discretion.

The Värmland Rhapsody, op. 36, rounds out the program. Folk-inflected, openly nostalgic, built for pleasure — it is what it is, and Järvi delivers it without apology.

This is not, to be precise about it, a disc that will shatter anyone’s musical world. Atterberg was a craftsman of high order working within a tradition already running late. But craftsmanship counts, and Järvi’s advocacy is warm enough and clear-eyed enough to make the case stick. Worth your time.