Alpha J.S.BACH Goldberg Variations Recomposed by Peter Navarro-Alonso

These Goldberg Variations present new perspectives on a well-known score. Danish composer Peter Navarro-Alonso's composition is a note-by-note reinvention of the original Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. Thus Alpha's innovative performance adds no additional notes in comparison to the original. It is merely through the very creative and extreme orchestration that the new composition gains its own life. “The combination of recorder, saxophone and percussion is clearly not very well suited to a baroque-style reorchestration,” claims Peter Navarro-Alonso, responsible for this arrangement tailor made for the members of Alpha. “But the richness in that combination lies in its enormous diversity in timbre and dynamics.” Alpha is a unique Danish ensemble, founded by Bolette Roed, Peter Navarro-Alonso, and David Hildebrandt, who all graduated from the soloist class at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen. As early as 2003, they were the first to explore this instrument combination, attracted by its many possibilities. Alpha was an immediate success, and have been prize-winners at contests and festivals all over Europe.

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)

Bine Bryndorf CARL NIELSEN The Organ Works

This CD is considerably enriched by Bine Bryndorf’s detailed and informative booklet-notes. Another plus point is that she plays the fine three-manual, 44-stop organ in Copenhagen’s former St Nicholas church. Dating from 1930, this instrument is exactly contemporaneous with Nielsen’s organ works. It has lovely soft registers and a well-blended tutti – ideal for this repertoire.

The 29 Little Preludes and a few miscellaneous works are concise pieces, suitable for liturgical use. They are straightforward compositions, with Baroque-like fugal textures and chordal writing in the manner of Bach and Mendelssohn. Only the occasional unusual harmonies and sudden key changes place this music in the early 20th century. Bryndorf’s excellent performances have calm, unhurried tempos, and her imaginative use of the organ gives each of the 29 Preludes their own unique tone colour. The CD also includes the majestic Festival Prelude for the New Century and six of Nielsen’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs. These latter pieces have simple chorale melodies, which are beautifully sung by the baritone Torsten Nielsen.

In contrast, Commotio occupies a more complex musical landscape. Given that it was inspired by the playing of the virtuoso German organist Karl Straube – a noted interpreter of Max Reger – it’s no surprise to find florid contrapuntal writing and extremely varied dynamics. However, Nielsen’s adventurous harmonic language belongs firmly in the 20th century. One can detect an awareness of Schoenberg’s atonal style, alongside pre-echoes of Hindemith’s organ sonatas and Sorabji’s symphonies. Bryndorf’s controlled, measured tempos (possibly a touch too slow in places) and carefully chosen dynamics enable Nielsen’s visionary composition to be heard with exemplary clarity. (Christopher Nickol / Gramophone)

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)

Danish National Symphony Orchestra / Danish National Vocal Ensemble / Danish National Choir / Thomas Dausgaard PER NORGARD Symphonies 3 and 7

Per Norgard is a major force among Danish composers, and no wonder. His music has exuberance, brilliance, and the freedom from inhibition or routine that we expect of a true symphonist in this post-Mahlerian age. His Third Symphony, in two big movements, features in its finale a chorus that among other things sings the Latin hymn Ave maris stella as well as a poem by Rilke. The words are completely unintelligible, what with all the other stuff going on at the same time, but it hardly matters because the music is stunningly colorful, atmospheric (cosmic even), and often very beautiful. There are tunes here, triadic harmonies, as well as wild dissonance, but it's all controlled so as to create an impressively intense pattern of tension and release, and to keep the ear engaged. You won't take in all of it the first time through, but you will want to come back for more, which is the first indication that we're dealing with a serious contender for "classic" status.

The SeventhSymphony, which just had its premiere a few months ago, is a bit tougher in its harmonic acerbity, but it's also easy to hear the same creative voice at work. In three short movements, it features prominent solos for 14 tuned tom-toms, and this highlights the driving force of rhythm that plays a major role here. The piece is over before you know it, and leaves you wanting more.

The performances under Thomas Dausgaard, recorded in the composer's presence, are presumably authoritative and sound just splendid. The orchestral playing has plenty of the necessary bravura, and in the Third Symphony the singers are very well integrated within the complex instrumental textures. If you're looking for some really good contemporary music, challenging but rewarding, full of personality and integrity, then this powerfully engineered production offers a perfect opportunity to satisfy your craving. (David Hurwitz / Classics Today)

Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra / John Storgårds PER NORGARD Symphonies 2 & 6

‘As if God the Father had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from the floor of heaven and asked me to work out the pattern.’ Not Per Nørgård’s words, of course, but those of his 1950s confidant Jean Sibelius in relation to his own Fifth Symphony. Nørgård’s Fifth was premiered in 1990 in a concert that included Sibelius’s; both are post-crisis, breakthrough scores and both represent a maturing of that concept of symphonic ‘flow’ that is so important to the two composers - the idea that once you get the symphonic river moving, the material will emerge readily enough.
Nørgård lets the listener decide how many movements the Fifth has but the material clearly springs from its opening gesture, as tectonic plates judder into a new position, allowing ideas to pour forth. The ensuing process is tight and controlled, even if the impression is of music that is entirely out of the composer’s control in its impulse and liquidity. Nørgård often uses ostinatos, chaconnes or even single-note anchors to pin the discourse down, but they never curtail its freewheeling spirit. Even when textures are at their most fragmentary, the thread remains; the river keeps flowing. The detail in the writing - articulation bestowed upon single instruments in the tiniest of gestures - is beguiling.
So are these performances. Listening across the orchestra is vital in this music, just as in Sibelius. The Oslo Philharmonic sound settled at the foundations while suggesting spontaneity on the surface. Storgårds offers a touch more nimbleness and translucence than Sakari Oramo, who started this Dacapo cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic. The brass and percussion offer extreme restraint and delicacy. The Oslo string sound is tight but can be wholly embracing too.
Never more so than when it appears to wrap the rest of the ensemble in a fog in the Fourth Symphony’s chilling second movement. In this piece we sense the disintegration of the tonal principles that were prominent in the earlier works towards something that, in Nørgård’s hands, is harmonically even more beautiful - the music getting more complex while getting less complicated. In that, the Fourth looks forward to the Fifth; in its slipping into grooves - the truest of them both unsettled and unsettling - it points towards the Sixth and Seventh. The symphony’s game of opposites is expertly realised by Storgårds, as when the dark second movement ‘Chinese Witch Lake’ glances in the direction of the light first movement ‘Indian Rose Garden’ in a fleeting gesture at the symphony’s close.
On a second disc, we have the chance to hear where those two pieces came from and what they led to. Nørgård’s Second Symphony is that most rooted in the ‘infinity series’, the integer sequence discovered by the composer in the 1960s that controlled a number of his works of the period. As Frank Lehman suggests in a lucid explanation of Nørgård’s exact algorithm on his Unsung Symphonies blog, the result is music that is ‘locally unstable but globally secure’.
For ‘globally secure’ read exceptionally well-formed: a spinning out of the first 4096 notes of the infinity series across a single movement span where bells herald each of the 16 phases and every fourth phase is capped by an exquisite brass ‘screen’. To begin, a delicate unison slides gradually into a semitone, and then the symphony is off on its way - cumulatively beautiful, structurally tangible and deliciously pure. The Oslo Philharmonic’s ability to collectively recede as if into a minimalist canvas, parts emerging thereafter with brightness and intent without distorting the contours, makes this performance. In music that’s deceptively tricky to pace, Storgårds delivers - again.
The Sixth Symphony is less cosmic and more rooted, but the river is still flowing: through rapids in the first movement into dark volcanic rock in the low-brass passacaglia of the Lentissimo and eventually towards the serene waterfalls of the finale. There’s intense joy in the music’s foibles; the slow movement’s wah-wah trumpet almost sees it sidle into that nightclub dance that comes to fruition in the Seventh Symphony. After the spasmodic Fifth, the Sixth feels like a work of new beginnings, despite a title that playfully suggests the opposite; you best hear what annotator Jens Cornelius describes as a ‘humorous game with the infinite’ in the symphony’s pregnant ending.
In this piece, Storgårds paints a more even, subtler picture than Thomas Dausgaard with the DNSO. In the Fifth, Storgårds offers more colour and character than Leif Segsterstam with those same Danish forces while also avoiding his fellow Finn’s histrionics. The rootedness Storgårds finds in the Second and Fourth Symphonies also puts him in pole position after Segerstam’s pioneering recordings; there is a Brendel-like eloquence and inevitability here.
It was about time we had new recordings of these symphonies, works that are absolutely worthy of reappraisal by new generations even in their relative youth. These are magnificent performances, presented with comprehensive booklet-notes by Cornelius and an introduction by Storgårds himself. That I fully expect new recordings to take their place in 30 years or less is a testament to the music’s relevance and strength.  (Andrew Mellor / Gramophone)

The Young Danish String Quartet CARL NIELSEN String Quartets Vol. 2

This admirable coupling by the Young Danish String Quartet of Carl Nielsen's string quartets in F minor and E flat major bolsters the notion that Danish performers are still best suited to represent Nielsen's uniquely Danish compositional voice. Both works here are youthful compositions written in a style fusing those of Grieg and Brahms. The Young Danish String Quartet rips into the big theme of the F minor quartet's opening Allegro non troppo ma energico with rhythmic power yet still express the following Un poco adagio's warm heart with yearning lines and lushly balanced sonorities. With lucidly articulated lines and effervescently buoyant rhythms, the young Danish players' interpretation of the E flat quartet's unique combination of a pastoral tone with learned counterpoint is wonderfully poised between the natural and the intellectual. If your shelf can hold only one disc of Nielsen's F minor and E flat major quartets, this disc will securely fill the spot. Dacapo's super audio digital sound is all enveloping with the four players of the quartet sitting comfortably around the listener in an otherwise empty hall. (James Leonard)

The Young Danish String Quartet / Tim Frederiksen CARL NIELSEN String Quartets Vol. 1

I’m not sure what the members of the Danish Quartet, who recorded the Nielsen quartets more than effectively in 1992 (Kontrapunkt, 10/93), think about a “young” incarnation appearing 15 years later. But I hope they would doff their caps in admiration, because these new recordings are top-notch, and I’m happy to echo and endorse the enthusiasm they have already generated in Denmark.

The benchmark recording has been that of the Kontra Quartet, sympathetic interpretations of works which do not enshrine the absolute finest of Nielsen, for all that he was an orchestral violinist and an experienced and enthusiastic performer of string quartets. But the new Quartet, all in their early twenties, bring a freshness and energy plus a level of sheer accomplishment that I don’t ever remember hearing in these works. Far from defensiveness or special pleading, they simply assume that they are playing high quality music and that their job is therefore to give it their all. The results are joyous, effervescent.
The First Quartet is the most striking beneficiary, since it can too easily sound texturally over-written and structurally effortful, as in the finale’s contrived “Résumé”. Such reservations are hard to entertain while listening to this thoroughly infectious account. Nielsen asks for energy in the first movement, and that is what the Young Danish Quartet give him, along with large-scale sweep and mellifluous tone throughout. The Fourth Quartet, a tough-minded cousin to the comic opera Maskarade, is interpretatively more challenging, and the Young Danish Quartet may in future find more subtly shaded routes through it; in the meantime their expressive candour and passion are entirely to the good. They are joined in the Quintet by Tim Frederiksen, under whom they studied at the Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen, and without quite transmuting base metal into gold, they display the various facets of what was a breakthrough piece for the young Nielsen to their best advantage. (David Fanning / Gramophone)