Allan Pettersson (1911–1980) grew up in a Stockholm slum, in a working-class family with no sympathy for classical music. With extraordinary willpower he studied violin and composition, later becoming a viola player in the Stockholm Philharmonic for ten years. His joints, deformed by rheumatoid arthritis, eventually ended that career too. He composed sixteen symphonies through long periods of hospitalisation, his music filled with repeated motifs, high-pitched cantilenas and a sense of brutal struggle. The Seventh Symphony caused a near-hysterical sensation at its premiere in 1968 under Antal Doráti – suddenly Pettersson's name was on everybody's lips. This disc brings together that work – in its first studio recording – and the Eleventh Symphony, both performed by the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Leif Segerstam. Full-blooded, deeply human works that go straight to the heart.