Espen Aalberg / Trondheim Sinfonietta / Kai Grinde Myrann MANTRA

On this disc, the Trondheim Sinfonietta, founded in 1998, has gathered four works from the three decades encompassing the ensemble’s existence. All four seem to be haunted by an even deeper past: Bent Sørensen’s Minnelieder is the composer’s third version of a work originally sparked-off by a book about the 14th century, while Toshio Hosokawa’s Drawing, from a decade later, was inspired by the very start of life. Kristin Norderval’s Chapel Meditation began its existence as an improvisation, but looks back to music from centuries earlier, while the most recent work, Mantra by Ellen Lindquist, also mines a venerable musical tradition, that of the age-old Indonesian gamelan orchestra that for over 100 years has had an influence on Western composers such as Debussy, Britten, Steve Reich et al.
Set for varying forces and numbers of performers, the four works together form a fascinating picture of the kaleidoscopic possibilities open to composers around the turn of the millennium.

Katrine Gislinge / Stenhammar Quartet MOZART Piano Concertos No. 11 - 13

Pianist Katrine Gislinge trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, and Yale University Over the last two decades she has established herself as one the most significant pianists in Scandinavia in both classical and modern repertoire with solo and chamber music concerts throughout Europe She has worked with musicians and conductors such as Okko Kamu, Heinrich Schiff, Gidon Kremer, Kurt Sanderling, Emmanuel Pahud and Gustavo Dudamel In 2014 Katrine premiered and recorded Bent Sørensen’s piano concerto Mignon – Papillons from the trilogy Papillons Katrine will also record the remaining two pieces, Rosenbad for piano quintet and Pantomime for piano and ensemble, to be released in 2017 for Dacapo She has recorded several CDs for, among others, Deutsche Grammophon and, in 2014, an acclaimed CD for Danacord Records with music by Schumann and Per Nørgård, who dedicated one of the works to her With The Danish Piano Trio she has recently released a Dacapo CD with Danish romantic piano trios She is currently recording a selection of Mozart piano concertos in chamber versions with the Stenhammar Quartet to be released for Alba Records in 2017.

Katrine Gislinge / Lapland Chamber Orchestra / John Storgårds BENT SORENSEN Mignon

Delicately dancing with silence, Bent Sørensen’s tender piano concerto Mignon –part of his Papillons trilogy – reveals textural beauty and melodic elegance in a language both modernist and sweetly nostalgic. The piece was written for Katrine Gislinge, one of the most significant pianists in Scandinavia, and on this premiere recording she is accompanied by Lapland Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Storgårds. An accomplished violinist, Storgårds even performs Sørensen’s two pieces for solo violin, Serenissima and The Lady of Shalott. Also included are the premiere recordings of two ensemble pieces – the classically inspired serenade Ständchen and the teasingly tuneful Sinful Songs.

Ars Nova Copenhagen / Paul Hillier JOHANNES OCKEGHEM - BENT SORENSEN Requiem

Johannes Ockeghem's Missa pro defunctis, probably composed in 1461, is the earliest surviving polyphonic setting of the requiem mass. The requiem continued to develop after this date (the Council of Trent mandated several new sections), and it was several centuries before it assumed the form it has today. Conductor Paul Hillier, who can get uncanny sonic effects out of a choir like just about anybody else, had the idea of taking requiem sections by Danish composer Bent Sørensen, composed between 1985 and 2007, and interpolating them among the sections of Ockeghem's mass. Several sections of the mass are also sung in plainchant. It must be said that the individual performances are strong even by Hillier's standards. Sample the Sørensen "Benedictus" (track 9), where sections of the Ars Nova Copenhagen exchanged a sort of shimmering pedal point. This kind of thing is what keeps people buying Hillier's albums. The Sørensen pieces have something of the quality of virtuoso American choral music by the likes of Morton Lauridsen or a less tonal and more cluster-oriented Eric Whitacre, and they're quite attractive. The Ockeghem performances are very strong as well, with crisp, tense singing accentuating the extreme length and complexity of the composer's polyphonic lines. What's missing is something that really ties all the music together. Sørensen does not write in a polyphonic idiom, and for the most part he did not compose the music specifically for this project. The new music doesn't link to the Ockeghem movement in any special way, and some of the movements, for no very clear reason, are left in plainchant. The multiple-language booklet attempts justifications, but they're hard to hear in the music. Doubtless the faultless sonics will attract many listeners, and others may find that just as Ockeghem added a new type of setting to the performance of a monophonic mass, the same may be done to his own music. But the experimental spirit works better here than the overall plan of coherence. (James Manheim)

Frode Haltli / Vertavo String Quartet LOOKING ON DARKNESS

“Looking on Darkness” is the solo recording debut of Frode Haltli, a major talent from Norway, destined to make his mark on several genres. His primary commitment, however, is to contemporary composition and this album features Nordic new music – from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland -  written for the accordion. Four of the five pieces are premiere recordings, with three written especially for Halti. They add up to a fascinating landscape of new music from the north, music which casts its inspirational net wide.

The centrepiece of the album is the 24 minute “Gagaku Variations” of Norwegian composer  Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, which sets Haltli’s accordion against the strings of the Vertavo Quartet. Maja Ratkje (born 1973) is  an unusual figure, a “multiple artist” (not unlike Haltli himself in this respect) working on many fronts – she is a composer, improviser, singer, keyboardist, violinist, studio engineer, the list goes on. Ratkje, who recently won the “Arne Nordheim Prize” for her compositions, has appeared on three ECM-distributed albums as singer with the improvisation ensemble Spunk, and a solo album “Voice” is in preparation for 2003 release. Her “Gagaku Variations” is in part the outcome of an extended trip to Japan, and subsequent transcription and study of  ancient Japanese court music. There are no direct quotations from gagaku in her composition, but instead an intuitive, poetic translation of the concept of “becoming”, of beauty taking form in silence that is central to the idiom.  Ratkje’s work also effects a ‘discourse’ between East and West, as haiku-like episodes are interspersed with blocks of sound whose elemental power recalls Xenakis or Stravinsky. Exchanges between the soloist and the quartet are, as Erland Kiøsterud notes “orchestrated as if  the string quartet and the accordion shared a long tradition”; it seems a most natural instrumental blending.

PerMagnus Lindborg, a Swedish composer (born in Stockholm in 1968) who studied in Norway, Holland and Japan,  and now lives in Paris, is not to be confused with the similarly named Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg (of whom more shortly). Lindborg’s teachers have included Brian Ferneyhough and Ragnar Soederlind.  Amongst his compositions are a series of “SonoSofisms” for diverse instrumentation. The “Bombastic SonoSofisms” (which are in fact playful rather than bombastic) were written for Haltli’s solo accordion; Lindborg has since also developed a version for septet. The music was conceived while travelling through Europe in the winter of 1996.  “SonoSofisms are musical sophisms”, Lindborg explains.  The composer has studied the sophists, working backwards, philosophically, from Bertrand Russell to Plato and Protagoras. Quote: “I like ancient history. It throws light on my own little spot of existence.” Although improvisation has increasingly  played a role in Lindborg’s writing, the leaping flurries of sound in these particular “SonoSofisms” are all written. Haltli calls this piece “the most ‘jazzlike’ composition on the album.”

Magnus Lindberg’s “Jeux d’Anches” is, like much of his music, an adventure in sound exploration.   Kiøsterud: “The notes spread out eagerly and playfully in this informally excessive work. With brilliant energy, Lindberg investigates the potential of the instrument.” Written in 1990, “Jeux d’Anches” is the oldest piece on the album. Instructive to listen to it now, when the received opinion is that the composer has grown beyond the “kinetic” and abrasive qualities of his early work to emphasize craftsmanship, and more conventional approaches to melody, harmony and colour. It is  clear that craftsmanship has been secure all along, and that Lindberg has never been exclusively obsessed with extremes.  As he has said: “I am avant-garde if that means being in the front-line of modern music, deeply aware of tradition. I do feel specifically that I am continuing the tradition of western art music.”

As indeed are  Denmark’s Bent Sørensen (b. 1958) and Norway’s Asbjørn Schaathun
(b. 1961) with their pieces. Haltli gave the premieres of these two works in 2001, and Schaathun’s composition is also written for Haltli.

Sørensen’s “Looking On Darkness” takes its title from Shakespeare’s 27th Sonnet: “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed/ The dear repose for limbs with travel tired./But then begins a journey in my head /To work my mind, when body's work's expired./For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,/Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,/And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, Looking on darkness which the blind do see”. The yearning quality of the poem is matched by the pensive melancholy of Sørensen’s music. Bent Sørensen, of course, was the subject of an earlier ECM New Series album, “Birds and Bells”,  released in 1999 to considerable acclaim, with the press testifying to the vividness of  the composer’s “dreamscapes”: “this is music you can almost see as much as hear” (BBC Music Magazine).  

Of Shaatun’s “Lament”, Kiosterud asks, “can a modern atonal work be a lament without grieving over its lost romantic melody?” and answers in the affirmative. “Classically structured in its composition with clear-cut formal elements, Schaatun’s piece makes use of the polyphonic potentiality of the accordion.” At times the instrument seems to be in dialogue with itself. (ECM Records)

Alpha THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

To reduce a group of works from a variety of different scorings to fit just three specific instrumentalists is a most unusual process: especially in contemporary music, where normally the composer’s original scoring is assumed to be sacrosanct. In these cases, however, the composers have all acquiesced in their treatment, and no wonder! The resulting music reveals the form and richness of each composer’s imagination in a way that is both startling and joyful. It is like comparing a winter woodland to its appearance six months earlier. Gone is the profusion of colour and sensuous abundance, but instead underlying shapes emerge that were concealed before, and a more muted range of colours displays itself, each one intimately compelling in its singularity. Eventually a new sense of richness is created as the mind and the eye – and the ear – adjust themselves to the world about them. What seems at first glance to be only grey and brown begins to show elements of red, and yellow, and blue, and even green.

What further distinguishes this recording is the fact that the performers have had a hand in creating the music, as well as re-creating it. This aspect of music-making plays all too little role in contemporary ‘art’ music, apart from those instances where musicians are asked to improvise – and thus to use a skill that may virtually have atrophied from want of exercise. But improvisation is only one aspect of creative performance, and Alpha’s close encounter with the musical essences of these works seems to have given the trio a precious sense of ownership of the music, even while the works mysteriously and naturally retain their identity with the composers who made them. This idea of music as something ‘open’ – in this case, specific notes and yet open to different instrumentation and therefore different modes of articulation (which in turn open up a cornucopia of possibilities) – is something rare and valuable.

And finally the music: it doesn’t sound to me like new music with that slightly forbidding aura of something that may be good for you, but doesn’t frankly quite grab your attention as you secretly want it to. This music does grab and hold onto you. One must therefore give honour where it’s due: to the composers of course. But I think it also has something to do with the way the performers too have re-imagined it, and in the process invented a new level of meaning for the verb ‘perform’. (Paul Hillier)

Frode Haltli / Arditti Quartet / Trondheim Soloists BENT SORENSEN - HANS ABRAHAMSEN Air

Frode Haltli, the uniquely expressive Norwegian accordionist, is heard here with chamber orchestra, with string quartet and solo, performing music by Danish composers Bent Sørensen (b. 1958) and Hans Abrahamsen (b. 1952). Haltli plays Sørensen’s It is Pain Flowing Down Softly on a White Wall with the Trondheim Soloists, as well as the solo piece Sigrid’s Lullaby. Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Little Nocturnes find the accordionist in the company of the redoubtable Arditti Quartet, “a vital institution in contemporary music” as Haltli says.

For the title composition Air, Hans Abrahamsen returned, at Frode Haltli’s suggestion, to the early solo work Canzona, revising it until it became a new piece. Of Abrahamsen’s music, Frode Haltli writes that “not one note is accidental, nor are any of the other specifications. Sometimes, this results in very complex music, while a moment later it is so simple that it seems a child could perform it. He writes music that can be on the verge of being discomforting, while at the same time it is indescribably lovely.”

Haltli acknowledges that the music of Bent Sørensen has been an influence on his development as a player. Sørensen composed the demanding Looking on Darkness (later the title track of Haltli’s ECM debut) for Frode’s first concert in Copenhagen, forcing him “to discover new ways of thinking and of playing my instrument, which I have continued to work on for many years, also in the field of improvisational music, and in other contexts than classical music.” In the same spirit It is Pain Flowing Down Softly on a White Wall challenges perceptions of what can be achieved on the accordion through tone control and nuances in soft dynamics. On the present recording, Haltli’s accordion blends into and out of the sound of the Trondheim Soloists’ nine violins, three violas, three cellos and double bass. Towards the end of the piece the Trondheim musicians take up melodicas, to create textures which seem like a ghostly echo of the accordion.

All of the music on the present disc was written for Frode Haltli, with the exception of Sigrid’s Lullaby, which derives from Bent Sørensen’s set of nocturnes for piano. “The piece flows easily into the adjacent but so different space of the accordion,” Paul Griffiths observes in his booklet essay. “The lullaby is repeated again and again, slowly dissolving in the waters of time.” (ECM Records)

Trio Aristos NORDSENDING

Nordsending was the name given by southern Norwegian people of the late Medieval and Early Modern period to magical attacks from the sorcerous sub-Arctic and Arctic. It was the ‘broadcast from the north’. Other peoples had other names for it, but they all understood it similarly: the invisible medium through which splinters of iron, stone arrowheads and little mice were shot into the bodies of the healthy by Northern witches.
With this programme of string trios – and one duo – by four Nordic composers, Trio Aristos has devised a nordsending of their own: thoroughly contemporary, but equally magical. The members of Trio Aristos have in various constellations worked with each of the composers – most extensively with Per Nørgård, the grand old man of Danish music, who is represented here with three works composed in the years around 1990, including the duo Tjampuan for violin and cello.
His younger colleagues all contribute one work each to the disc, written between 2009 and 2014. Kaija Saariaho found inspiration for her four-movement trio in different cloud formations, while Bent Sørensen added to a series of works inspired by Venice when he composed Gondole: its five movements are impressions of gondolas waltzing, mourning and falling in love. Gondole was commissioned by Trio Aristos, and so was Rift, by the Norwegian composer Henrik Hellstenius, who recomposed the piece for these performers from his earlier series Imprints.