Strindberg began his
musical life as a rock musician. He
performed for a number of years with
the progressive group Ragnarök
(playing flute it seems, maybe inter
alia) but studied at the Royal University
College of Music in Stockholm from 1980-87.
At present he teaches at the Gotland
School of Composition. He’s now fifty,
time for an appraisal of the music he’s
written within the last sixteen years
or so.
Since his avowed position
is to make music "without any compromises"
we are in for a rocky path with some
of these works. Utvald features
an occasionally counter-tenor like soprano,
Annika Skoglund, and music that moves
from meditative and almost static to
suddenly eruptive, with sinuous drones,
percussive interjections, and cymbals
clashes. Strindberg also utilises electronics
– and a kind of heavy metal vicious
sonority that I happen to find unpleasant.
2 Pianos predates Utvald and
scores more highly for its playfulness
and use of repetition, rhythmic displacement
and more controlled fractiousness, which
is more deliberately corralled in this
medium. Hopp (Hope) is a saxophone concerto.
For a few bars I thought he was sailing
close to Nyman’s bark, but it’s a chimera;
squawky, bloody-minded and off-putting,
it’s Birtwistle’s Panic without his
daemonic drama.
I träd/Within
Trees is the earliest work here – in
two parts. The first is heavy on the
metallic with stiff percussion and tinkling
bells – nowhere near as relaxing as
you might imagine. The booklet features
diagrams – ones that look like the progress
charts of a knockout sporting competition
finally emerging with the one winning
box. As for the composer I admire Strindberg’s
single-mindedness but I can’t understand
his music and the more I heard the less
I understood.
Jonathan Woolf
The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Friedrich
Goldmann 
