I don't think you're being unfair at all. At other times I might well have agreed with you. I suspect that there is better to come in the cycle, and when I come to whatever conclusions might end up being possible after I've listened to the rest, it may well be that the Fifth won't be something I'll be returning to in a hurry. In most ways it's an advance on its predecessors, and, whatever shortcomings I might think it has, for me it's prevented from being dull mainly by way of its expressive intensity.

Here I am again with a brief report on last night's listen to the Sixth. Petterssonians seem to agree that this is the symhony in which he really gets into his stride, and on the evidence I have so far I would have to say that, while the previous works had me sometimes forcing myself to retain my interest (though mostly successfully), this one had my full attention from start to finish and is a very individual work indeed. While it begins with the kind of morose meditations with which I'd become familiar in the previous works, its thematic material and the way it's developed have this time a greatly more confident and purposeful profile, but the most striking thing about the hour-long single movement is the "coda", which occupies not much less than half of the entire duration and consists almost entirely of a slow and strangely meandering melody (which apparently is based on an early song by AP) in various kinds of unison, supported by a pulsating, low-pitched and harmonically almost immobile swell of an accompaniment. I've really never heard anything like it, certainly nothing that stays in this "zone" for such a seemingly endless duration. The closest parallel I can think of is the "epilogue" of RVW's own Sixth (my favourite moment in his entire oeuvre, I should add, or of the fraction of it I know).

This is the first of the cycle of which I'd say without hesitation "give it a try".

Richard
Fear not. This running commentary is being stored away in the martle memory banks (at least) and, with my new determination to listen more widely and betterer, shall be put to good use. 

And in the tin memory banks too, though with my newfound determination to get through some of the piles of unlistened CDs on my bedroom floor before buying too many more I may wait a while before hearing for myself.

In the meantime, and completely by coincidence (I hadn't mentioned Pettersson), the following appeared in my email inbox last night from the Queen of Serbia (prompted by the recent Gaudeamus publicity photo some of you have seen):

LOL!!

Contrary to my own expectations I did manage to find the time and attention today to devote to the Eighth, which I found almost as powerful as the Sixth. Unusually for AP it has two movements of more or less equal duration. The first is suffused by an insanely insistent two-note (E/F) motive with an accompaniment that at one point seems to threaten to become a morbid kind of habanera but never quite gets there, while the second assembles a somewhat more varied group of thematic objects (including one that reminded me disturbingly of stabs of pain) before eventually returning to the E/F obsession of the first. The second movement is also permeated by the sound of the snare drum - at least two of them, in fact, which seem to sound as if at different distances from the listener as well as different dynamics, though this might be a peculiarity of the recording. I realise these are highly superficial and inadequate remarks in the face of a work of considerable depth and complexity, so I think I might have to listen to it again before moving on.

Returning to the Sixth for a moment, I was thinking about its being "suicidal and depressing", and, though I think I know what our vicarious correspondent means, I don't hear it that way and nor do I really think it was intended that way. It seems to me more an embodiment of Beckett's "to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living." The existence of the work is in itself "life-affirming" (how could it not be?); Pettersson (like Beckett) isn't feeling sorry for himself, he's feeling sorry for human suffering. Or so I hear it, more or less.

I don't know if I fully see this myself (I do not understand what exactly you mean by 'life affirming').  I do see it as being an intensely emotionally, however, with the present emotions seeming, to me, to be rather of the bleaker sort for the most part.  But I would not consider it depressing.

Just listened to #8 there.  In the background though, so I took in rather little; seemed much more smoothly put-together than #7. It is not enough to say this I know.

I reckon, just by existing, any work of art worth its salt must always fail to 'be depressing' because the fact that someone has created it gives hope.

If it is just crap however, it can't be depressing either because, by definition, it fails to express anything effectively.

'Being depressing' is therefore the one thing that art can't do.
 
Samuel Beckett and Allan Pettersson cheer you up.

QED