During a career lasting more than six decades, Hilding Rosenberg composed a large number of works, including eight symphonies and twelve string quartets, testimony both to an extraordinarily creative imagination and to the composer’s profound respect for tradition and craftsmanship. Intriguingingly Rosenberg was also unusually open to the modernist currents of the early 20th century and, to the fairly provincial Swedish musical establishment at the time, he soon became a symbol of everything that was incomprehensible in ‘modern music’.

In retrospect, Rosenberg's compositional style is closer to that of Stravinsky and Scriabin than that of the serialists like Schoenberg and Berg. His Third Symphony was actually first presented as a ‘radio play’ entitled ‘The Four Ages of Man’ in the early 1930's. Written in 1951, The Sixth offers ample proof that Rosenberg still composed on the basis of a strongly individual attitude towards the expected and traditional.