Jeisler was born in Sweden in the town of Klockrike. From 1906 he spent his life in Paris as the organist of the Swedish Church there. His music now resides at the Royal Library in Stockholm. The scores include four symphonies (played by the Concerts Colonne and the Concerts Pasdeloups), nine string quartets, six violin sonatas, two cello sonatas, five piano trios and much else. In Paris he married the cellist Marguerite Caponsacchi. He was a friend of Saint-Saëns and accompanist to Ninon Vallin, Casals and Thibaud.

On this showing his earlier music took its imprint from his Franckian contemporaries but developed a overwhelming and very different power in the Adagio for strings. The sonata and the organ work are suave, undulatingly romantic, pleasingly constructed, not much given to melodramatics but neither are they short on emotional drive - listen to the Franckian melos of the allegro molto e con brio finale of the sonata. There are no Gothic squalls in the organ piece. Jeisler is much more at home with adagio-lento than with scherzo and brio. There is a cool jazzy air to the scherzo of the sonata but a soul is laid bare in the wonderfully slow swung adagio which catches the murmur of steadily tolled bells. Can this be an emotional after-wash of bereavement from the Great War? It sounds consistent. The songs vary in their compass from the Grieg-Schumann ballad of Under rönn och syren to the arpeggiated enchantment of Par ce soir pluvieux to the Fauré-inflected Les Barques to the Poulencian Rafales d'automne and L'Ile de la mort. We are not told the date of the Adagio but it is a work with more harmonic complexity than any of the other pieces here. Its sombre mood sounds almost morose rising from a brooding pavane to a resonant piercing climactic intensity in which Jeisler seems to call out in angry protest. I would have guessed a date some time during the Nazi occupation or possibly just after the liberation.

The notes are in Swedish and French only - each language allocated to a separate booklet.

Rob Barnett

 

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