Tor Aulin Violin Music – Swedish Chamber Orchestra

Tor Aulin was a violinist of the first rank — Jenny Lind’s own countryman, a pupil of César Thomson in Brussels, a friend of Grieg’s, and a figure important enough that Sibelius wrote the Violin Concerto partly with him in mind. He died in 1914 at forty-seven, of a brain tumor, a genuinely awful end. The music he left behind is not profound, exactly, but some of it is more than charming, and this disc makes a persuasive case for taking him seriously.

The two dance sets come first, and they deliver exactly what they promise. Rustic. Tuneful. Firmly rhythmic. Aulin knew his Grieg — you can hear it in the modal inflections, the drone-bass suggestions of the nyckelharpa or the fiddle — though he lacks Grieg’s concentrated aphoristic gift. These pieces tend to run a phrase or two longer than they strictly need to. A Brahmsian or a Dvořák would have tightened the joints. Still, the abundance is its own pleasure, and the first of the Three Dances from Gotland has genuinely spicy harmonic writing, the kind of chromatic sidestep that catches you off guard the first time and seems inevitable on the third.

Willén and the WDR Radio Orchestra, Cologne handle all of this with evident affection. The playing is clean, the ensemble attentive, the strings warm without being sentimental. I could wish for a touch more lift in the dance rhythms — occasionally the music sits rather than springs — but Willén’s sympathetic pacing compensates for what isn’t quite sprightly enough in the articulation.

The incidental music to Master Olof is another matter, and a considerably more interesting one. The play is August Strindberg’s historical drama about Olaus Petri, the sixteenth-century Swedish reformer — a young man’s work, written in 1872, revised obsessively over the following decade, and not successfully staged until 1881. Aulin set it late in his career, and you can hear a maturity the dance sets don’t quite reach. The orchestration is splashier, yes — brass fanfares, cymbal crashes, sweeping melodic arcs — but there’s emotional depth here too, a regal restraint in the introduction that gives way to something genuinely moving in the death scene. That scene, in particular, stays with you.

The album itself is a problem I can’t quite shake. CPO’s engineering has been inconsistent lately, and this disc sounds over-reverberant in a way that muddies orchestral texture — the timpani boom and blur, and in louder passages the sections push against each other without proper spatial definition. It’s not unlistenable, but it’s a real handicap for music that depends on clean rhythmic attack. Someone should have opened a window.

The best Aulin I know remains the Violin Concerto No. 3 — pastoral, unhurried, continuously gorgeous in a way that somehow holds the attention more completely than its modest dramatic profile has any right to. Master Olof belongs in that company. The dances are delightful, whatever their modest ambitions. This is music the world has largely forgotten, and that seems, after spending time with it, like a genuine loss.