Jag halkade in på Pettersson när jag surfade på Youtube och nu är jag sugen på att skaffa en, eller kanske flera, skivor med 7:e symfonin. Jag har redan Sergiu Comissionas live-version med Radiosymfonikerna från 1990. Hur tycker ni den står sig?
Är Doratis inspelning från 1969 Da Shit, eller ska man gå på någon av de nyare inspelningarna på skivbolagen BIS eller CPO?
"Giordano Bruno" skriver så vackert om den här musiken i en recension på Amazon:
Honestly, you shouldn't hear any of Allan Pettersson's sixteen symphonies first on a recording. There's too much orchestral color and too much dynamic range, from pianissimo to forte, to be technically compressed and squeezed through speakers or headphones. This is true, of course, about all great modern symphonic composers, but in Pettersson's case, the problem is that his works are almost never performed by orchestras in the USA, and those fans who rave about his work - take a peek at the reviews here on amazon - are flabbergasted at his lack of recognition. So CDs are the only recourse, and this CD, recorded by the less-than-well-known Norrköping Symphony, is acoustically as good as one could possibly hope.
Pettersson is essentially a conservative tonal composer, but his tonality is stunningly overlain with passages of polytonality, just as his steady moderate tempi are overlain with quirky polyrhythms. Occasionally there are suggestions of twelve-tone composition, but don't let it worry you; you won't hear them as such unless you are trained in musical theory. What you will hear is a dense swirling texture of instruments and percussion, a soundscape mostly of shimmering beauty but occasionally shaken by bursts of unsettling tumult.
A composer of beautiful surfaces? A composer of anguished depths? Pettersson was a Swede, and perhaps because I'm another, I hear a lot of landscape in his music, the same sonic boreal forest and tundra that I hear in Sibelius, Rautavaara, Norgard, or Lindberg. What sounds dark and foreboding to other listeners, I suspect, sounds like over-the-snow-to-grandmother's-house to me, so largely I hear Pettersson's music as beautiful surface. Emotional response to music is very subjective. But then he plunges me into drifts of feelings that transcend mere intellectual appreciation of orchestration. About two-thirds of the way through the Seventh Symphony, for instance, he casts away much of the colorful cross-rhythms and dissonances, and lets the lower strings sing a hymn - no, not a real hymn! - but a hymn of sublime consolation, even if I didn't yet know that I wanted consolation. Well, that's how I hear it; I know the trick, the shift from dorian tonality to a major scale, but I insist that I hear consolation!
Pettersson's symphonies are all, I believe, composed as seamless single movements. The Seventh is forty-six minutes long. Some listeners apparently find their attention spans challenged by Pettersson, and maybe that's why orchestras are chary of performing him, but the Seventh is a work of infinite variety that compels attention and rewards it proportionally. Pettersson is less concerned with thematic beauty in his Eleventh Symphony. Even more than the Seventh, the Eleventh is a swirling current of polyphony eddying around a deep steady largo, a pulse slower than that of a winter animal at rest. Only half as long as the Seventh, it demands more patience, but it too will reward the listener who lets the music flow through him or her.
Don't bother to listen to the 30-second samples of any of Pettersson's symphonies. Trust me, the Seventh is sublime. You want to know this composer!
Jag har tex. en sisådär 10 olika inspelningar vardera av Bruckners 8:e och 9:e symfonier, varav många gamla godingar från 1940 och 1950-talet. 
