Swedish Chamber Orchestra

Artist ∙ Classical

The Swedish Chamber Orchestra has gained worldwide prominence since its founding under its current name in 1995, with conductor Thomas Dausgaard. The orchestra has often performed and recorded Romantic-era works at the ensemble size (about 40 players is typical) for which they were originally written. The contemporary Swedish Chamber Orchestra was formed by the merger of the existing Örebro Symphony Orchestra and Örebro Chamber Orchestra. Dausgaard assumed the conductorship in 1997 and launched a recording program that included a complete cycle of Beethoven's symphonies. Further recordings have appeared on Naxos (often featuring neglected Swedish orchestral music), and Sweden's BIS label. ~ James Manheim

September 3, 2015 at PDT
Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5 (Emperor) and Choral Fantasy. The Complete Orchestral Works of Beethoven vol. 12
4 Tracks
March 30, 2023 at PDT
Mozart: Ecstasy & Abyss [LEIPZIG, 1789]
Mozart instantly sprang to mind when Martin Fröst began planning his debut album as a conductor. The Swedish clarinetist’s love for the man and his work took hold in childhood and has burned bright for over 40 years since. “Mozart’s music is my life,” he tells Apple Music Classical. Fröst’s choice of what to record landed on some of the greatest works of the composer’s final years. The final repertoire selection—together with the album’s Ecstasy & Abyss subtitle—was shaped by the contradiction between the exquisite beauty and profound emotional insights of music written by a composer who was often deep below the poverty line.

“It’s hard to put into words what Mozart was going through in the late 1780s and early 1790s,” observes Martin Fröst. “But after his father died in 1787, you feel he was no longer trying to please anyone. Even though he was going through a financial crisis, you can’t hear that in the music.” His album’s first disc includes two joyful works: the concert aria Ch’io mi scordi di te? and the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, both of which were included by Mozart in a concert given at Leipzig in 1789 to raise much-needed income. But first comes a richly detailed, intensely musical interpretation of the “Jupiter” Symphony, supported by virtuoso playing from the Swedish Chamber Orchestra.

“You need a balance between surface details, phrasing, and form,” says Fröst. “But I love to work with details in Mozart music: articulation, breathing, and colors in the sound. You have to listen for all these subtle things that you can’t find in the score. Mozart sometimes leaves things to our own musicality.”

Read on as Martin Fröst takes us through each work on Mozart: Ecstasy & Abyss [LEIPZIG, 1789].

Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter”
“Mozart wrote his three last symphonies, Nos. 39, 40, and 41, within less than six weeks in the summer of 1788. His infant daughter Theresia died just days after he completed Symphony No. 39. He had no money and complained that he could not compose—he was in a crisis! And then this music just came. I think that’s one of the reasons why his music is so personal and, at the same time, so universal. He had this divine voice that spoke to the people about the people. And there’s great beauty in it.

“For me, this music is opera. And opera is about breathing. If the orchestra starts to breathe and brings these natural physical movements to the music, then you can back off and leave them to it. Because I’m a wind player, I wanted to do away with the feeling of the bar lines and make the ‘Jupiter’ more alive. If you compare this performance to other recordings, I hope it will sound very fresh.”

Ch’io mi scordi di te?
“This concert aria for soprano, piano, and orchestra really suits Elin Rombo’s voice. We’ve known each other for a long time, and she was a very natural choice. When we first heard her sing it, I was very convinced. It’s about the warmth in the sound and the way she uses the lyrics. Mozart wrote it for Nancy Storace, an English soprano who was a star of the Italian opera company in Vienna. She and Mozart probably gave its first performance during her farewell concert at the Theater am Kärntnertor in February 1787. He revived it two years later for a performance he gave in Leipzig with his friend Josepha Duschek, part of a tour that also took him to Dresden and Berlin. Mozart was so desperately short of money, and the tour was supposed to help him raise funds at the box office and land commissions from the music-loving King of Prussia.”

Piano Concerto No. 25
“I’ve worked with the pianist Lucas Debargue for many years. We first played together when we recorded Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. He’s such a very unique player in his sense of freedom, which you can hear in the way he plays this Piano Concerto. It’s the freest piano-playing I’ve ever heard. He’s like a singer who does all of these ornaments yet at the same time you understand everything completely.

“Mozart included the Piano Concerto in C Major, which dates from the end of 1786, in his Leipzig concert in May 1789 with Josepha Duschek. He also played his Piano Concerto in B flat in the same program. The concert, which was arranged at short notice, was poorly attended and left Mozart almost no profit!”
8 Tracks
April 6, 2023 at PDT
Mozart: Ecstasy & Abyss [PRAGUE, 1791]
Mozart changed Martin Fröst’s life forever. After his childhood efforts on the violin ground to a halt, Fröst turned to the piano but made slow progress. Yet something clicked when his father returned home with a recording of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. The beauty of the music and of Jack Brymer’s solo playing touched the nine-year-old Swede’s soul. He began studying the clarinet and soon set the foundations of what has developed into an illustrious career as soloist and all-around musician.

Mozart, he tells Apple Music Classical, was “the god who breathed life into the clarinet.” Martin Fröst has done much to breathe fresh life into Mozart, as his recordings of the composer’s works for the instrument demonstrate. When it came to making his debut album as a conductor, with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, he turned again to Mozart, releasing two albums set around works from the last five years of the composer’s life. Featured here is Fröst’s performance of the Clarinet Concerto and, in the role of conductor, the “Prague” Symphony.

Read on as Martin Fröst guides us through each work.

Symphony No. 38 “Prague”
“It’s understandable that people talk about the ‘Jupiter’ above all Mozart’s symphonies. You look at the coda in the finale, where he puts together five themes in a double fugue at the end, and you ask, ‘What was he on?’ But if you then look at the ‘Prague’ Symphony, you can see, right away in the first movement, that he was almost as complex in handling its themes. He uses six melodies, which he develops and integrates with each other. You really have to study it in detail because he’s turning those themes around, upside down, and using them in a totally brilliant way.”

“Parto, ma tu, ben mio” from La clemenza di Tito
“This aria from the opera La clemenza di Tito is scored for soprano and clarinet. In it, the character Sesto asks his beloved Vitellia, daughter of the deposed Roman emperor, to give him one tender look before he goes to avenge her by assassinating his friend and her father’s successor.

“Ann Hallenberg has sung this often, of course, but to be honest, I have done it only once before in concert. One of the reasons for that is because I didn’t have the instrument for which it was written, the B-flat basset clarinet. I borrowed one from a French clarinet player who was also the person who made it, and practiced like crazy on it. I was so happy because the whole album is built around this deep voice of the soul of the clarinet. The B-flat basset clarinet has this intimate sound, a little softer than the clarinet in A.”

Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra
“Mozart died less than two months after completing his Clarinet Concerto. He wrote it for the virtuoso player Anton Stadler and his basset clarinet, but it was only published in the early 1800s in a version adapted for the ordinary clarinet. That meant that parts of the original piece had to be transposed upwards to sit within its range. People thought there was something wrong with the score because if you look at it, you see all these octave transpositions. The original manuscript was lost, and the basset clarinet vanished too. The basset clarinet part was reconstructed following the publication of an article in the 1940s, and copies of Stadler’s instrument were made after some sketches of it, printed in a program book for one of his concerts, were rediscovered in 1992.

“This is my third recording of the Clarinet Concerto. What did I add? Well, it’s a closer sound, it’s more friend to friend. The recording is closer, has less reverb, so you hear the tonguing and the details more, I think. It’s like hearing the consonants when someone speaks—the text comes out a bit more clearly. And of course, my interpretation is 10 years older than the last, and the cadenzas are longer and more personal.”
8 Tracks
November 5, 2015 at PST
Haydn: Trumpet Concerto in E-Flat Major, Hob. VIIe:1 - Single
3 Tracks
March 31, 2004 at PST
Classical Trombone Concertos
13 Tracks
August 31, 2020 at PDT
Beethoven: The Piano Concertos
18 Tracks
December 2, 2021 at PST
Mendelssohn: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3
8 Tracks
July 8, 2003 at PDT
Haydn, Hummel & Neruda: Trumpet Concertos
15 Tracks
December 31, 2006 at PST
Sverigeboxen - Filharmoni Och Folkton
56 Tracks
July 24, 2006 at PDT
Reinecke: Harp Concerto, Flute Concerto
7 Tracks
April 8, 2021 at PDT
The Brandenburg Project
35 Tracks
April 4, 2019 at PDT
Mysliveček: Complete Music for Keyboard
24 Tracks
August 30, 2001 at PDT
Beethoven. Symphony Number 7 / Egmont Music
14 Tracks
February 9, 2023 at PST
The Essential Schubert
33 Tracks
May 30, 2024 at PDT
Henselt & Bronsart: Piano Concertos
6 Tracks
April 2, 2020 at PDT
Mozart, Weber & Du Puy: Bassoon Concertos
9 Tracks
December 31, 2001 at PST
The Best of Lars-Erik Larsson
20 Tracks
January 4, 2018 at PST
Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73
18 Tracks
January 16, 2006 at PST
Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik - Serenata notturna - Lodron Night Music, No. 1
13 Tracks
August 6, 2020 at PDT
Brahms: Orchestral Works
14 Tracks
February 28, 2011 at PST
Det Goda Livet
34 Tracks
February 2, 2023 at PST
Weill: Orchestral Works
8 Tracks
June 30, 2007 at PDT
Klassik Highlights - Music for the 20th Anniversary of Naxos
12 Tracks
October 11, 2003 at PDT
Mozart: Flute Concertos, Nos. 1 & 2
9 Tracks
September 6, 2003 at PDT
Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 50, 51 and 52
12 Tracks

Swedish Chamber Orchestra

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