If ever there was a giant in Swedish music, it was Hilding Rosenberg (1892 – 1985).

He is called the first Swedish modernist, against a backdrop of the Swedish national romantic music of conceived right before and also parallel to his own composing. However, his music is hardly modern in the minds of the listeners of today.

The artistic oeuvre of Rosenberg is characterized by a rigor, a clarity that immediately moves associations in the direction of the late aphoristic writings of Vilhelm Ekelund. Both these – to the cultural treasures of Sweden so important – artists, were born twelve years apart by Lake Ringsjön in the southern district of Skåne, Sweden. Vilhelm Ekelund was born in Stehag in 1880; Hilding Rosenberg in Bosjökloster in 1892. Perhaps it should be investigated – somewhere else – how the Skåne landscape around Lake Ringsjön affected these artists’ path towards the transparently clear and in the deepest meaning of the word, Pindaric, pre-Socratic classical, concerning form as well as content. That would be a worthy task!

The fruits that the artistry of Vilhelm Ekelund and Hilding Rosenberg produced are among the finest gems of the Swedish spirit through the centuries, in a perspective that runs all the way from the resounding rune carvings of the Viking age in a line through Ehrensvärd and Geijer up to the vibrating NOW which forces its way into the yet unthought thoughts of a new millennia.

Vilhelm Ekelund was a writers’ writer, and Rosenberg a composers’ composer. Rosenberg has generally had an enormous influence on the Swedish musical life during the 20th century, but in particular he fostered a number of disciple composers, whose name has gained their own luminosity, like for instance Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Sven-Erik Bäck, Ingvar Lidholm and Daniel Börtz, to mention but a few select ones.

Rosenberg graduated from an organ education in 1909, after which he sustained himself as a concert pianist and music teacher a few years, before he commenced his studies in Stockholm, with piano studies with Richard Andersson 1918 and a little later counterpoint with Wilhelm Stenhammar. After having upheld the position as the head of The Royal Opera in the early 1930s Rosenberg’s chief occupations were composing and teaching.

Hilding Rosenberg’s musical day’s work was ample. It contains eight symphonies, a six hour long oratorio based on a Biblically inspired work by Thomas Mann, piano music, solo songs, vocal works, organ music, solo concertos, operas, ballets etcetera – all characterized by the very special Rosenbergian, transparent, lofty and autumn-like, austere seaward archipelago atmosphere, which has the maritime horizon and the visions that dance there as its final prosody.

It is, however, in the string quartets that Rosenberg’s artistic genius reaches its peak, as it is in the aphoristic writings of Vilhelm Ekelund that the finest of Swedish thought wells forth like clear water out of a natural well, in the hidden fern-shade coolness of the depths of the forest.

Rosenberg wrote twelve quartets all in all, plus one piece called “6 Moment Musicaux” which usually is referred to the string quartets, and one unfinished quartet from 1942. These works were written between 1920 and 1972, but most of them underwent later reworkings by the composer. During an uncommonly prolific period during 1956 and 1957 he composed no less than six string quartets, no:s 7 – 12.

Caprice’s complete edition of the String Quartets in a box cannot be praised enough. They have gathered the best interpreters for the delicate mission of interpreting one of the greatest achievements in Swedish music. The result is brilliant! These quartets, from the old Kyndel Quartet to the modern Tale Quartet, play with a penetrating sensitivity and initiated restraint called for by these glistening facets of the Swedish string quartet literature.

Here are the forested hills of the northern horizons. Here are Vilhelm Ekelund’s wanderings across the ice of the 1940’s straits of Saltsjöbaden. Here we all have something to learn about ourselves.