Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #126651 in Music
• Released on: 2002-06-04
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
Four premier recordings add up to a generous dose of Magnus Lindberg's orchestral mastery, served up in lovingly prepared, magnificently engineered performances by the composer's friend and longtime champion Esa-Pekka Salonen. Within just a few minutes into Cantigas, you're swept up by swirling pools of color chords, ticklish brass flurries both muted and open, and chattering, petulant rhythmic figures that bounce off a pliable canvas of dense sonorities. Imagine Respighi's Pines of Rome Swiss-cheesed through a kaleidoscope, and you'll get the idea. Parada reveals a more austere side of Lindberg's protean talents, while the more sparely scored Cello Concerto showcases Anssi Karttunen's virtuosity. He deftly tosses off Lindberg's zigzagging melodic lines (which the orchestral members quickly answer or comment upon) and sails through a cadenza jam-packed with twitchy pizzicato pellets, buzz saw low notes, and suspenseful silences. Lastly, Fresco is a mega-study about loud and soft, laid out in huge sound blocks that effortlessly glide from gentle to aggressive. Booklet notes include clear, insightful, and informative composer comments. --Jed Distler

Customer Reviews

Amazing orchestration, like all Lindberg
This collection of works is another example of the orchestrational genius of Lindberg. You find yourself amazed at nearly every sound you hear, and then amazed that you continue to be amazed...it's that good. It's flawed, of course, as the "spectral approach" to composition has yet to produce formally coherent music, no matter who writes in the style. There are interchangeable moments amongst Lindberg's works, even though the empurpled program notes speak of the delicate formal processes. One sometimes hears the phrase "taking a tonal bath" to describe simply relishing in the sound of late romantic music...we could use "taking a spectral bath" in this context, and it would be more appropriate, for this is the most sophisticated stoner music ever written and one gets the impression that you could start or stop listening anywhere and enjoy the ride. I do, however, recommend careful, sober listening for all of you kids out there. Lastly, Amazon's price (less than $10 when I purchased) is stupendous -- well worth it.

Fantastic Cello Playing!
Enough has been written in the other reviews, particularly the succinct editorial review, to give you an idea of this music,yet nobody seems to have said explicitly that you will ENJOY it, so I will. The Cello Concerto is deeply layered with compositional ideas, worth hearing many times, but it's also transparent and highly colored with virtuosic cello passages. To me this seems like "the best of both worlds" -- a composition that's musically profound but not pedantic, flashy but not trite.

Two of Lindberg's best pieces together with two not so successful
THE MUSIC OF MAGNUS LINDBERG is a Sony collection of four pieces by this great contemporary Finnish composer performed by the orchestra Philharmonia with Lindberg's old school chum Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting. Though Lindberg is still concerned with harmonies as he has been since the late 1980s, the pieces here inaugrate new techniques that set them apart from most of these earlier harmonic works. Two of the pieces here are thrilling, while the other two are fairly disappointed, so I am of mixed opinions about this disc.

"Cantigas" (1999) might be the finest piece Lindberg has written to date. While not a concerto, it gives an important role to the oboe, performed here by Christopher O'Neal. Based around the simple interval of a fifth, the piece marks a new phase in Lindberg's composition where pieces are more clearly broken into sections than before, allowing some room to breathe among the dense harmonies that Lindberg is known for. The five sections of "Cantigas" are cycles of increasing and decreasing tempos, and the music is very energetic and rhythmically compelling; Anssi Kartunnen writes that the room in which Lindberg composed the piece was littered with "empty instant espresso bags, energy drink cans, vitamin pill jars..." which explains a lot. I should note that "Cantigas" is a part of a "symphonic triptych" with "Feria" (1997) and "Fresco".

The "Cello Concerto" (1997-1999) was written for Anssi Karttunen, who performs here. Like "Cantigas", this piece is part of Lindberg's new technique of sectioning, and it is in five movements played without a break, each one of them divided into smaller sections. The concerto is similar to his early piece for cello and orchestra "Zona" in the use of a chaconne technique of continual variations. In each movement, the various sections have the same harmonic structure, which is reworked over the course of the movement. Overall, the piece makes a transition from the avant-garde to romanticism, with the cadenza serving as the bridge. The piece is representative of how Lindberg uses the concerto genre: harmonic material for the orchestra is created from ideas generated by the soloist, as when the minor third stated by the cello at the beginning comes to permeate the entire orchestra. This is a very entertaining piece, and ranks with "Cantigas" at the top of his work so far.

"Parada" (2001) came from an attempt to write a genuinely slow piece, since so much of Lindberg's oeuvre is made up of blazingly fast music. It consists of two layers of thematic material, one being a normal melodic line, and the other very, very slow-moving sounds, that don't meet each other. "Fresco" (1997) is similar in its exploration of non-intersecting contrasts, in this case inspired by the Balinese gamelan's "loud" outdoor and "soft" indoor styles of playing, but is much longer and sectioned. While theoretically interesting, the two pieces fail to excite like almost everything else Lindberg has written.

This disc is exquisitely engineered--the sound of the percussion in "Cantigas" is especially splendid. The liner notes contain a fine interview with Lindberg that helps to grasp the structure of the works. It is a pity that the material here is not entirely captivating. If you've never heard Lindberg's work before, try the more consistent Ondine disc with "Feria", "Corrente II", and "Arena" as an introduction. Fans of the composer will nonetheless want to pick this one up sooner or later since "Cantigas" and "Cello Concerto" are very worth hearing.