I månaden Tjaitra (1914)

De vilde svanama (1918)

A marginal figure even in Sweden, Sigurd von Koch is scarcely known in this country. But since he definitively took up composition only when he he was approaching his mid-twenties and since he died comparatively young in the influenza epidemic just after the First World War there is not very much to know (his son Erland von Koch has been a rather more prolific composer). There are, however, a few orchestral and chamber works of distinction and, most interesting of all perhaps, over sixty songs, many of them to texts of oriental origin or of exotic inspiration of one kind or another.

Of the two Koch items in this programme, I månaden Tjaitra comes from Exotiska sånger (Exotic songs) to words by Sigurd Agrell and De vilde svanama is one of several settings of Hans Bethge’s translations from the Chinese in Die chinesische Flöte. Even so, in spite of the example set by Mahler in his Bethge settings in Das Lied von der Erde, Koch shows little interest in applying an exotic musical language to his oriental texts. While the melodic line of I månaden Tjaitra is distinctively nordic in shape, other features of the song - its harmonic intimacy, its fervently repeated piano figurations and the occasional shadowing of the voice in the left hand - seem to derive from Fauré. As sensational as I månaden Tjaitra is lyrical, De vilde svanama is an impressive dramatic inspiration, its stormy piano part so accomplished in its scoring as to recall Rachmaninov at times.