“Death has nothing to do with mercy ... Life was the intention, not death.” “In the tunnel of death in which I now live there is no man, no God, nothing living. Only me, Godforsakenly alone.” So wrote Allan Pettersson in hospital in 1970-71, while sketching his Tenth Symphony, as part of a “dialogue between me and the work” (reprinted more fully in the accompanying booklet). The statements might stand as mottos for this, perhaps the bitterest of his compositions, which rages through an impressive edifice constructed out of the sparsest material. Pettersson was very adept at making a little go a long way, but never more so than in No. 10, completed in 1972, the basic motifs retained in sufficiently recognizable shapes throughout to give the whole the feel of a giant passacaglia.
The Eleventh (1973) was sketched alongside its predecessor but shares little of its impotent fury, though one should not be fooled by the geniality of the opening. Despite the most fleeting of thematic cross-references between them, these two symphonies obviously form a pair, as if two sides, one abject, one objective, of a common trauma.
Alun Francis secures fine accounts of both works from the North German Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, that of No. 10 being to my mind superior to Dorati’s pioneering LP version for Swedish EMI (5/72 – nla), although in No. 11 Segerstam, with cleaner, more natural sound, has a definite edge. Those collecting the CPO series will need no encouragement to obtain this disc; those unsure would do well to invest in these humane readings of two highly charged testaments to the indomitability of the human will.'