Rolf Lindbloom was born in 1944 and made this recording in 1985. Beginning his professional career as a jazz pianist he later studied at the Stockholm College of Music and has now made a number of recordings for Proprius, taking in repertoire from Gershwin to Tubin. This disc unashamedly embraces stillness – there’s even an injunction to listen to it at a low volume – and delves into unusual and often welcome waters to make its case.

The obvious limitations of lack of variety and somnambulism have been well met by Lindbloom and if I’m not always convinced by his playing I admire his scope. Lindbloom is rather high-handed and overemphatic with the Bach and his dynamics are constricted but he compensates with a very romantic Wiklund (the first of two by the composer that he essays). The Satie Gnossienne is nicely inward but, again, his Debussy is rather undifferentiated. In the main his playing of Ravel and Debussy is significantly less convincing than his more overtly romantic playing – where his tracery and imagination are their fullest. I wonder whether in some way the disc’s avowed "function" has limited a more visceral response from him to these works. La valée des Cloches from Miroirs, for example, is very deliberate and slow, quite lacking drama and the dynamics are very muted (it’s unfair to invoke Gieseking perhaps but their conceptions could not be more markedly distinct).

Elsewhere he catches something of the unease in Schoenberg’s Op 19 No 2 of Sechs kleine Klavierstücke – and full marks to him for including Op 19 No 6 as well – as indeed he does the stasis at the musical heart of Kerstin Jeppsson’s En dröm. His playing of the traditional song Limu Limu Lima is delightful.

An uneven recital then in many ways - and that goes for the recording as well which is inclined to be a little recessed and to have too much bloom around the tone. But there are some nice touches, imaginative choices and one feels Lindbloom is a thoughtful musician.

Jonathan Woolf

 

 

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