Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101449 in Music
• Released on: 2002-07-23
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds

Customer Reviews

Norgard's Nordic Sound
This is a positive review but it begins with one or two small cavils. Per Nørgård (born 1932) studied with Vagn Holmboe and he stands in the Danish symphonic tradition that passes from Carl Nielsen through Holmboe to composers of the living generation. Nørgård's first symphony, his "Sinfonia Austera" (1955), shows the definite imprint of his teacher and might even be mistaken for an unknown Holmboe score. Nørgård's later symphonies (Nos. 2-5) veered from tradition. The marks of form and tonality that made "Sinfonia Austera" so impressive gave way to what could and sometimes did sound like directionless orchestral improvisation. Nørgård abandoned Holmboe's technique of "metamorphosis" in favor of his own "infinity series." He cited Indian music as an influence and talked in Jungian language about "archetypes." There is something disconcertingly "new age" in much of Nørgård's work in the 1970s and 80s and early 90s. He often composed on a large scale, like his elder Swedish counterpart Allan Pettersson, but without the anguish or the drama - or the propulsive ostinatos - that make the latter's neurotic outpourings endurable. Nørgård's sounds were often lovely; the level of actual dissonance was never high (much less so than in Pettersson). But the works labeled "symphony" corresponded to something other than what is usually brought to mind when employing the term. Here's the good news: Nørgård's Symphony No. 6 (1998), subtitled "Når alt kommer till alt," shows the composer resurrecting, as it were, more than a bit of the formality that gave "Sinfonia Austera" its memorable outline. The subtitle might be translated as "When all's said and done" although the annotator casts it in English as "At the end of the day." In either case, the saw has a valedictory connotation and suggests a stoical summing-up. Symphony No. 6 is in three movements (on the pattern of "Sinfonia Austera" and of many of the Holmboe symphonies), with the last two played without pause. Clocking in at over seventeen minutes, the initial Moderato is as long as the other two movements combined. As in "Sinfonia Austera," Nørgård serves up a real conflict symphony; like many a characteristic Nordic symphony, "Når alt kommer till alt" seems to represent a cosmic war between darkness and light. The impression is especially strong in the Moderato. By incorporating in the score an array of bass register instruments, the composer heightens the contrast between high and low, or "daylight" and "nighttime" sounds. In fact, the movement opens with a kind of descent from the starry heights, with the dark depth rising gradually to meet and mix with the radiance. The effect is similar to the one achieved by the Finn Kalevi Aho in the opening movement of his Tenth Symphony, which makes a good reference point, should anyone know it. The turbulence of the first movement of Holmboe's "Sinfonia Borealis" (his No. 8) also comes to mind. The middle movement, marked Lentissimo, offers nine minutes of cool, shadowy repose before the dualistic conflict is taken up again in the concluding Allegro Energico. The companion to the symphony on this disc is another of Nørgård's recent works, "Terrains Vagues" (2000; revised 2001). The title comes from a suite of poems by the Danish poet Klaus Rifbjerg. The three movements, lasting in total about a half an hour, are: "Terrains," "Vagues," and "Terrains Vagues." The punning is clever, and I suppose it is represented in the music by motivic cross-reference from movement to movement. Not quite as symphonic as Symphony No. 6, "Terrains Vagues" is nevertheless more formally obvious than the works typical of Nørgård's middle period, from Symphony No. 2 to Symphony No. 5. As in "Når alt kommer till alt" one has a sense of conflict and motion, especially in the machine rhetoric of the first section. These particular "Terrains" seem to be under assault by bulldozers and other engines of excavation. If the "Vagues" of the second section brought to mind Debussy, the association would not be too far off from the mark. The human and machine presence has withdrawn to the distance. Nørgård recreates Impressionism with a modern (I guess people would nowadays call it a postmodern) vocabulary. In the third and final section, "Terrains Vagues," Nørgård achieves a more jocular tone, as though the human and the natural had been felicitously reconciled. Thomas Dausgaard leads Danish National Symphony Orchestra in performances that bring out the formal features of both works and so help listeners to understand their moderately difficult musical syntax. Chandos has recorded the complete cycle of Nørgård's symphonies, a work of real devotion. All of them are currently available according to the booklet. The commitment of Maestro Dausgaard, of Leif Segerstam (who splits the series with him), and of the entrepreneurs at Chandos should more than counterbalance, for non-prejudiced readers, my own paltry reservations about the whole cycle of Nørgård's symphonies, as expressed above. The Chandos engineers, who do their usual fine job of managing the acoustics, everywhere make the complicated polyphony transparent. Strongly recommended.

Derangements.
Per Nørgård has become a Prospero in his later years, starting with his 5th symphony, where he conjures holographic islands of sound separated by hostile abysses. It is also a symphony about writing a symphony, full of hesitations, tremblings before the dictates of fate, where Nørgård seems to stop before a precipice and ask himself, "Can I go on? Do I have the right to go on?" And then he does, and you almost have to cover your eyes like a teenage girl watching The Exorcist.

His 6th and supposedly final symphony, subtitled "At the End of the Day," is both less grandiose and more disquieting. You could call it without exaggeration the last word in musical expressionism. What Nørgård does with the orchestra here is unprecented -- he creates a constant burbling magma of sound that, after you get used to it, becomes almost indistinguishable from silence. But it's the kind of silence that only a madman would ever hear -- a silence that isn't really silence, but a barely-perceptible nattering in your head, egging you on, as if you were Wozzeck, to murder, rape, suicide. Or something equally unpleasant. Layered on top of these voices from the pit, if that's what they are, are a series of Concerto for Orchestra-type moments that are so imaginative, so chilling, so visionary, that they've literally recurred to me in dreams. This is music that gets under your skin like a tick.

The most striking of these is the moment scored for flute ( I think ) and percussion early on, unmistakably influenced by Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres, that Nørgård has hinted is really the culmination of the symphony. This moment, coming as it does after three minutes of mercilessly accumulating tension, suggests Straussian death and transfiguration -- to be more specific, it's like shooting off a cliff and waving your legs helplessly in a sea of stars, the part of the dream where you wake up with a shock. But here you don't wake up. I would say that the "protagonist" of this symphony, if you can speak of such a thing, dies at this very moment -- the rest of the symphony, then, becomes either a postmortem or an uncomfortably believable tour of the afterlife. This interpretation is just one of many, but no one listening to this symphony will deny that the word "ghoulish" has just been given new relevance. The tubas that pierce the orchestral mist like foghorns, the static second movement, which is surely an evocation of limbo, the bloodcurdling final bars... There is little doubt that Nørgård is writing his own epitaph in a cold-blooded and even nihilistic way that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the valediction or endless leavetaking of the romantics.

Space is running out, but there is one other work on this disc, Terrains Vagues, that must be at least briefly mentioned. Though it is dedicated to the conductor Thomas Dausgaard, it will take much persuasion to convince me that this isn't funeral music for Iannis Xenakis. Anyone who has heard Jonchaies will get a feeling of deja vu here, but Nørgård is too original to ever ape another composer. This is a tribute that rises to the level of its model -- no mean feat, as Jonchaies is perhaps the most overpowering piece of music ever written. But where Xenakis' work is like the ultimate song of sorrow, a primal scream, Nørgård's has a stronger sense of narrative, as well as the gallows humor so characteristic of him. The repetitive grinding theme of this tone poem, which Nørgård has called his Tapiola, makes me think of the Stephen King story where a plane is flying ahead of little black Pac-Man figures, representing time, that are chomping down everything -- forests, continents, oceans -- in their path.

The sixth is undoubtedly one of Norgard's greatest symphonies
This Chandos disc, part of its series of Per Norgard's symphonies performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, showcases his sixth and supposedly final symphony, and is filled out by an orchestral work of similar proportions. For some reason, Leif Segerstam, conductor on all previous installments, has been replaced here by Thomas Dausgaard, but with fine results. I was very impressed by this disc.

"Symphony No. 6" (1998-99) is subtitled "At the End of the Day", and has a peculiar form with a long initial movement, and then two following movements played without a break which combined are shorter than the first. Perhaps a bit of background on Norgard's work is necessary. Norgard's first big breakthrough was the infinity series, a fractal-like method of serializing melody, harmony, and rhythm which he first presented outright in "Voyage Into the Golden Screen" and the Symphony No. 2 (see my reviews of the respective Da Capo and Chandos discs for the theory behind the series), and which culminated in his dazzling Symphony No. 3. At the end of the 1970s, he abandoned the cosmic oneness of the infinity series for a series of schizoid works inspired by the mad Swiss artist Adolf Wolfli. Then after the mid-1980s he seemed to go off exploring myriad theoretical paths, from polyrhythms to interference tones to the so-called "tone lakes", a method of generating harmonies.

What Norgard's sixth symphony does is bring synthesis to all the concepts he used disparately throughout his career. He returned to the infinity series, exploiting hitherto-unused aspects of this boundlessly deep well, giving the symphony a sense of momentum and cohension. The descending scale that opens the work will remind the listener of the opening of the third symphony, but here it is chromatic while the earlier work was diatonic. There's the shift between smooth passages and jagged, the "idyll" and "catastrophe" of the Wolfli period. Some of the horn writing is reminiscent of his Nordic predecessors such as Sibelius, and harkens back to his early interest in the Nordic klang.

The end result is a work that sounds something like Norgard's 1977 work "Twilight", but with vastly expanded colours, shifting tempos, and even the occasional violence. The heavy use of low instruments-- such as double-bass clarinet, bass trumpet, bass trombone, double-bass trombone, and double-bass tuba--is intended not to be heard on its own, but provide contrast so the listener can appreciate the glittering high passages. This touch seems a first for Norgard, and in spite of all the summation of past glory he does here, he still marches ahead. I'd rate the symphony right up there with the third and fourth.

The symphony ends with a motif, and it's picked up by the 2000 orchestral work "Terrains Vagues". This can't be considered a continuation of the symphony, but is clearly an independent work whose chief interest is rhythm, though it is uses much the same forces. Durations are marked as to be played "vaguely" or "strictly", a sort of aleatorism that creates unpredictable but loveable variations among parts. Three metronomes are employed, which clash with various orchestral planes--it seems Ligeti's "Poeme Symphonique" was no Fluxus prank, but prophetic! The piece is unusual in Norgard's oeuvre, and in contemporary music in general, in giving a prominent role to the accordion.

Especial praise must be given to Chandos' sound. This is one of the most expansive and powerful recordings I've ever heard, in spite of the mere stereo sound. And the liner notes are relevatory and written in clear and entertaining prose. If you're unfamiliar with Norgard's symphonic achievements, the Third is probably a better introduction, but the Sixth is a must-have and this be one of the first Norgard discs you pick up. And how fortunate we are that the disc is filled out by a work that is just as strong.