Despite the best efforts of some truly outstanding composers surrounding La Belle Époque, Scandinavia has largely yet to be seen as more than one entity in the Classical world. Norway, Denmark and Finland all have internationally famous masthead composers (Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius respectively), but Iceland and Sweden still don't, though at least in Sweden's case many fantastic artists have found middling international success (such as Hugo Alfvén and Lars-Erik Larsson). Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985) is one of the middlers as of this writing, yet he has the wonderful distinction of being Sweden's first modernist, though not a Webern-level modernist. Rosenberg was more akin to a Swedish Impressionist, expanding upon familiar chords to exotic ends, and luckily for me plenty of piano music flowed from his pen. His 1939 Improvisations are actually tightly crafted, miniatures valuing elegance and incisiveness above rhapsodic excess. And though it isn't the only leaf in the pile, the sixth improvisation is the most evocative.
Though the trick is as old as Bach, "pedal" sonorities are an easy and effective way to add depth and sophistication to a piece - sustaining a bass note or chord beyond the point it would have changed in a tonal context, letting the resulting dissonances rattle and hum. Rosenberg's pedals create a huge span across the keyboard, requiring a light and swift touch to keep the tempo up. My first thoughts, as they are wont to be, went to Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie, one of my favorite pieces ever and one I played incessantly in High School. The Improvisation never reaches that piece's glorious heights (or depths?), but it makes a dang fine case for itself in the Hall of Echoes. The tightly-voiced, tempo-shifting inner lines have a passing resemblance to ancient choral music, especially after the gorgeous shift from D minor to B-flat sostenuto, as undulating, plainchant perfect fifths take over for a time before winding down into D. The piece doesn't have a large arc like La Cathédrale Engloutie, but rather circles around a handful of sonorities, its dynamics never breaching pianissimo, its melody never evolving. The change to B-flat is a moment of woozy clarity, but that soon gets lost in itself, as if the listener is passing a hole in a cloudbank to see the sun, but forced to continue onward. It's a listening experience akin to being lost in a maze - vacant and elliptical, echoing nothing back except your perception of it. Though if the labyrinth was really englufed, one could swim to the surface. This recording (luckily the only recording uploaded by the performer from the whole set) uses the sostenuto pedal of the piano to hold the "pedal" notes while allowing the right sustaining pedal to change freely, keeping things from getting too muddy. She also employs a heck of a lot of sensitivity, letting the plainchant sting from the placid surface, making this a labyrinth I wouldn't mind getting lost in. Except for the requisite disembraining* by the Minotaur.
~PNK
*Because Christmas is the perfect time to make an Ubu Roi reference.
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