Niklas Sivelöv has proven himself a prolific symphonist over the past decade, completing six symphonies and currently working on a seventh. Symphony No. 1 (Nordico) was written in the summer of 2013, during a surge of creativity following the birth of the composer's son on July 30 of that year. The title can be understood both as a reflection of Sivelöv's upbringing in northern Sweden and of at least some of his strongest influences, most notably Sibelius. The music bristles with energy and verve, suffused with the rich colors of the Nordic forest, the deep blue sky and - in winter - the all-enveloping snow. The work consists of three movements of more or less equal duration, lasting a total of about half an hour. The composition is highly virtuosic and makes considerable demands on a standard-sized orchestra, whose forces are augmented only by a large percussion section and - as is usual with Sivelöv - a substantial section for his own instrument, the piano. The first movement is almost cinematic in its assemblage of extremes of rhythmic drive and intensity of expression, and the effect is that of a stop-motion film of the natural world, in which things normally invisible to the naked eye can be shown proliferating and evolving. Behind these disparate elements, a sonata form can be discerned, and although the influence of Sibelius can indeed be felt in the ubiquitous use of ostinato and in some other surface features, the musical language is entirely Sivelöv's own. The sky darkens for the second movement, a long symphonic elegy originally titled Ode to Edward Munch. Munch explained that his most famous painting, The Scream (1893-1910), was painted while walking at sunset, "when I heard the tremendous, unending scream of nature." Sivelöv's music is restless and anxious, as if sleepless, and although the movement's inexorable progress is punctuated by a great deal of nervous and excited rhythmic activity, it is bereft of all action power, and the movement's climax is an empty fermata measure marked - for all the players - "silent scream." The finale is a tour de force of rhythmic ingenuity, with incompatible elements battling for supremacy. The metrical intricacies are all the more sophisticated because the time signature itself remains mostly in 3/4 time. A syncopated idea at the beginning of the movement has its origins in Miles Davis, and there are other moments in which the listener can recognize the spirits of such disparate figures as Berlioz and Stravinsky. The composer's original title for the movement was "Firedance of the Witches," and there is certainly a trace of the witches' sabbath in the way the movement moves toward an eruptive, fire-breathing conclusion when a sustained chorale-like hymn in the brass is consumed by a screaming, clamoring orchestra. Written in 2020, the Fifth Symphony is a dyptich subtitled Concerto for Orchestra. The work's two "panels" are not intended as opposites, but as twins made of the same material, reflecting Sivelöv's initial idea to divide the work into a single movement. In its final form, the two parts are of almost equal duration, about 24 minutes in all, again for a modest full-sized orchestra with an important role for the piano After composing the densely contrapuntal Fourth Symphony, which also contains a rather rigorously conceived passacaglia, Sivelöv deliberately aimed for a simpler and more direct idiom in the Fifth, structuring the first movement as a series of variations in which the divisions are quite loose and not always easy to discern. The theme is first heard in the violins at the beginning of the work and develops continuously, giving each instrument an important role, in keeping with the spirit of a concerto for orchestra. In contrast to the First Symphony, the instrumental demands here are less extravagant; the virtuosity is calmer, more innate, and less demonstrative. Indeed, the work is much more intimate overall than No. 1, reflecting devotion to the composer's "introverted and thoughtful" mother. The thematic material of the very beautiful second movement has its origins in a jazz ballad Sivelöv composed about Ringo, one of his cats who "had a way of sneaking around so that you couldn't hear it." While not lacking moments of powerful expression (and one sequence of pure feline playfulness), the music remains mostly quiet and restrained, taking all of its harmonic elements from its blues-inspired source. The title Silent Tail, as in Debussy's piano preludes, appears only at the end of the score, below the gently resolving last measure. (Paul Mann)