This is one of those best-of-all-possible worlds releases, with the nearly 80-year-old Swedish choral conductor
Eric Ericson (he split the Polar Music Prize with
Bruce Springsteen a few years back) leading the gorgeous young French chamber choir
Accentus. At times it's almost too perfect -- something like going out on a date with someone too beautiful to be real, and having the nagging feeling that in being so seduced you are missing something. Is
Ericson uncovering hitherto unsuspected connections among these composers, or is he obscuring the differences between the Swedes and the always more iconoclastic Finns? It's not good to quibble too much in the face of seduction like this, however. This is a cappella choral singing at its best, sumptuous yet perfectly controlled, and equally elegant in little folklike pieces from the nineteenth century and in modern works with tone clusters and other extended techniques. The program is intriguing, combining a few familiar works (like
Sibelius' Rakastava) with composers rarely heard outside Scandinavia (
Jørgen Jersild,
David Wikander), and accomplishing a nifty progression from disc 1 to disc 2: the second disc contains more extended works and also contains music that for the most part is chronologically later than that on disc 1, but the chronological boundary is smudged -- making the point that chronology is less important than nationality and a regional voice in this music. What's really impressive is the way
Ericson makes all the music hang together. The
Sibelius-
Rautavaara link in the realm of orchestral music is one that many listeners have doubtless experienced but also found hard to pin down beyond a vague kinship of attitude -- the compositions of the two don't really sound very similar. But here all kinds of little similar details come through -- the naïve, singsong quality of Rakastava informs several of the
Rautavaara pieces and also looks back to the nationalist aspect of the earlier Swedish composers whose lighter works round out disc 1. The overall result is a couple of hours of sonic bliss. Maybe it's too blissful -- if you took
Ingmar Bergman to hear this music, he'd probably have to be carried out in a cold sweat. But who cares?