Anne Sofie von Otter, Bengt Forsberg - A Summers Day: Swedish Songs (2012)

Listening to the songs on this release by famed Swedish mezzo soprano Annie Sofie von Otter, you might think they were in more or less chronological order; the last two of the five sets, by Franz Berwald (the only one of the composers known at all outside Sweden) and August Söderman, are in a much more advanced structural and harmonic idiom than the others. In fact, although Söderman's are the latest, those by Berwald, which you could take for a group of little-known quasi-dramatic pieces by Schubert, were written around 1820, before the songs by Adolf Fredrik Lindblad and Erik Gustaf Geijer. What's happening instead is that two separate traditions are represented here, one concert oriented and the other domestic. The heart of the program consists of the 13 songs by Lindblad, separated into two groups (although the four Geijer songs don't do too much to separate them). These are the domestic pieces, written in a moderate vocal range and simpler piano language, with accessible texts dealing more often than not with the natural world. Lindblad is a gifted melodist, and the weightier songs by Berwald and Söderman have novel episodic structures. Is this a lot of short, middlebrow Swedish songs for a single sitting? No doubt, even with a pair of soprano-baritone duets on hand, but the program is done with evident affection by von Otter, and any number of individual items may be of interest to vocalists; there's a wealth of hummable tunes here.