This Sonata was composed some six years before Nielsen’s
Commotio, but fits much more comfortably into the Romantic mould. Its composer was Swedish and is famous in his own country for a fetching little piece, much played at weddings and funerals, based on a psalm melody from Dalarna. He established himself as a conductor and organist in Stockholm who wrote more for the orchestra than for the organ. The third movement of the G minor Sonata is a Sarabande ‘aged’ by parallel fifths, and the finale is a muscular ‘Allegro con brio’ haunted in places by the spectre of Rachmaninov.
from notes by Ian Carson © 1994
