Have Wiren's symphonies 2-5 and the quartets. For me these are works that can be listened to, both intellectually and emotionally, numerous times with pleasure and even great pleasure. They shine if one appreciates comedies and tragedies of manners, rather than (or not just) heaven-storming artistic testaments. They evoke Klee more than Kandinsky (to mention tempermentally different artists who were close colleagues with related aesthetics, as opposed to artists who became penned in by socially conditioned artistic animosity such as Schoenberg and Hindemith).

I love heaven-storming artistic testaments such as one gets from Atterberg and Tubin, but in the many hours when my mood is not keen enough to support sustained listening to such artistic challenges (and the notion of using such art as background music is obscene), I have lots of time for deeply honest but more constrained artists such as Wiren.

Bravo, Yates. Can't wait to hear this.

Hi dhibbard. It is thanks to Mr Frykberg that we can hear this unpublished work, which strikes me as the best of Larsson's symphonies. Frykberg certainly has the measure of it, but the (live) performance is scrappy, the winds sometimes out of tune and the strings undernourished. As for the symphony itself, the first movement, in triple time, is clearly reminiscent of Nielsen's Espansiva, but it's the diction and rhetoric that stem from Nielsen, not the tunes themselves. The finale similarly sounds as though the composer has paid attention to Prokofiev's works of the previous decade -- though by no means slavishly so. The overall impression is of a well wrought work by an eclectic composer who definitely has something to say. Not quite as consistent a voice as, say, Dag Wiren. And nothing like the penetrating power of Vagn Holmboe and Eduard Tubin. But a fine musical companion.

With games like this, rules were made to be broken. Those are three fine lists, cilgwyn! They illustrate the incredible richness we have to choose from in art music. I'll have to look into Daniel Jones and Tournemire, neither of whom I know except by name.

 Thanks, cilgwyn. That's a must buy for me. I listen to Hill's first symphony with pleasure several times a year.

The BIS recording of Larsson's symphony 2 by the Helsingborg SO under Frank is much better than a mere stop-gap. But we urgently need a fully professional account of symphony 3, played with panache -- the sort CPO has provided before to Scandinavian symphonists.

Read the Schuman 10 in score before I heard it. When I _did_ hear it was pleasantly surprised at how much better it sounded than it looked. (It looked like gestures recycled from earlier symphonies.) That said, the only recording of Harris 13 is by an extremely amateur group that may not have been able to project the long line Harris intended. I admit to doubting that, though. It's just hard to reconcile the excellence of Harris 11 with the banality of Harris 13. I'm open to discovering that I have missed something.

The good news is that labels have always been dropping like flies. My father started a record label in the 1950s that didn't make it. And friends of our family who had record labels saw them go down the drain, too. (This is in California, where once upon a time Fantasy Records published both Brubeck and Skalkottas.)

Do you think it's more a matter of saturation? Or more a matter of social change?

With respect to symphony 5, when I first heard Jarvi's performance of the first movement it seemed much too fast, as if he didn't really believe in the musical experience Alfven was trying to convey. I noticed on the internet that Alfven had recorded this himself and that his own recording was several minutes slower than Jarvi's. Of course I picked up the Alfven performance to see what it's like. What it's like is two long accellerandos; both end at least as fast as Jarvi but of course start much slower. I haven't heard other Alfven performances of his symphonies, but clearly he was another of those prosodic composers who suffer under the autocracy of the metronome.

I have the highest regard for Stig Westerberg's recordings of Stenhammar. He's really superb, for instance, with the second piano concerto and the Serenade, the tempos in both of which have lots of ebb and flow. How are his performances of Alfven?

Anis Fuleihan, "Twilight Mood" for piano (c) 1940.

Yes, great atmosphere as well as musical argument. Thanks, Jolly Roger!

Ah, Melartin/Grin, the set that introduced most of us to these wonderful symphonies, which really deserve to be represented by recordings that eschew ill-advised cuts.

Klami... very tempting!

Re Novak's ballets -- the ballet-pantomime is a Czech version of the sort of ballet we associate with French Baroque opera -- but with lots of folk admixture and generally broad humor. Before Novak it wasn't considered a candidate for art music. Since him, it has been. The recordings and performances on the Supraphon discs demonstrate splendid technique and spirit. I bought these superb discs (gently) used, which made them affordable.

I shall get this for the Phantasy.

Maestro Davis will be hard pressed to improve on the cogent rendering of the Overture, Elegy and Rondo by the Slovak Philharmonic under Barry Wordsworth. Lewis Foreman or someone once justly remarked on Bax's neoclassical turn in this work. Ever since, one hears little besides echoes of this summary. For what it's worth, here's a different (not contrary) account.

During this period, after Symphony 2, Bax was making a great effort to achieve greater concentration in his art. To that end (and having written many lucid sonata forms over the years), he wished to think of a symphonic first movement as a form dedicated above all to creating a natural dramatic climax out of its initial materials. That is precisely what Bax does in the Overture: he exposits several melodic constructions, develops them, and ends.  Alas, I (after years of listening to sonata forms) have a hard time not hearing the movement as an attractive and well-argued exposition and development that ends just where one would expect a recapitulation. Wish I could abandon such preconceptions during listening (without resorting to recreational substances) but to date have not succeeded. The Elegy is finely wrought, and the Rondo works well as artful and high-spirited music for the Christmas season.

Decades old, but new to me: the dual ballet-pantomines 'Signorina Gioventu', op. 58, and 'Nikotina', op. 59, by Vitezslav Novak. The first is a passionate paean, the second a delightful drollery. Both works are clearly products of the 1920s, both possess an aesthetic sophistication one might not expect from the Novak who wrote 'The Storm' and 'Pan', often considered the high points of his art. The ballet-pantomimes were intended as a double bill and they work wonderfully in tandem.