Symphony No 9

Allan Pettersson occupies a lonely place in 20th -century music - seemingly alienated from any "school", professing an empathy with criminals and outcasts, and using the tools of an earlier generation: symphonies, songs, and concerti. Yet, more than any composer of our time, he has been able to provide a musical testament of a spiritual longing faced with the existential void that we see in the faces of the homeless, the sick, and the beaten-down. Although his music has been labeled "pessimistic", it is inherently hopeful and consolatory - we come away exhausted but enlightened. Isolated first by choice and later by crippling illness, he remained essentially unknown outside of Sweden until Antál Doráti championed his music with the recording of the Seventh Symphony in 1969. Today, 15 of his 16 symphonies have been recorded; one recording label is closing their complete cycle of his work, and another is well underway. (Pettersson withheld his First Symphony, and we are unlikely to hear it.)
"I hate to have to part company from my fellow admirers of this unusual, possibly unique, twentieth century composer, but for me the Ninth just does not cut it as a masterwork. I was "with" Pettersson up until the time I heard this work, but upon listening to it I must say a certain disappointment set in, and fairly quickly. I find it a lot of "sound and fury..."--well, you know the rest of the quote. And the final pages seem to me to be uninspired, as if Pettersson had no convincing way to end the work and tacked on what another reviewer (in Fanfare some years back) termed "a perfunctory Amen cadence." I think the composer just "wimps out" and goes soft at the end; he would never have been able to come up with a truly Mahlerian coda so he resorted to the "Amen"--Amen for what, anyway?
The performance and recording are, of course, another matter; they are top-flight. On the other hand, I'm certainly not surprised no other conductor (not even Segerstam so far) has tackled this unwieldy monster. Admirers of this composer (and I continue to be one of them, though nowhere near as enthusiastic as I may have been a few years back) will no doubt wish to respond to me, but I hold to my conviction that with the Ninth, before he was finished writing it, Pettersson ran out of things to say"
(Amazon.com)