Recordings

Character pieces by Malling, Enna, Glass, Svendsen, Nielsen,
Gade and Lange-Müller.

In the era that in French is called Belle Époque, an ornate beauty and a warm fullness of emotion were at the core of art. And here the violin had an unforgettable moment as the singing instrument par excellence. In Denmark several composers created a marvelous repertoire of short, melodic pieces for the violin. The Danish violin works contributed their own accent, often a little introverted and sometimes with influences from Nordic folk music.

Allan Gravgaard Madsen’s brand new double concerto for violin and piano greets the night starting with one single note which in the course of the movement unfolds into cascades of harmonies throughout the entire orchestra. Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen was the maverick of contemporary Nordic music until his death in 2016. The violin concerto For violin and orkester ventures into the jungle in the classic Gudmundsen-Holmgreen-style forcing us to reassess our place in a world full of noises.

These three great Romantic violin concerto certainly have an important place in Danish music history: from Niels W. Gade's grand, finely orchestrated concerto from 1880 through P. E. Lange-Müller's concerto from 1902 with its many moving melodies to 1943-44 when Rued Langgaard combined old virtues with new currents in his brief pastiche of a violin concerto. These three rarely-performed works are presented by Christina Åstrand, here in good Finnish company with the Tampere Philharmonic and its chief conductor John Storgårds.

The Hungarian-born György Ligeti and the Dane Per Nørgård are two of the most individual and influential figures in the music of our time. Written within a few years of each other their violin concertos both have solo parts which combine brilliance and lyricism, in the true concerto tradition, though in unconventional ways. Both place these solo parts within orchestral writing of layered complexity, with an overall plan of more than the traditional three movements. And, more coincidentally, both concertos require departures from conventional tunings and make use of melodies written much earlier in their respective composers’ careers.

Kuhlau championed new tones in Danish music, and his melodically appealing violin sonatas were the first Danish sonatas in the Romantic style. This cd, containing the last four sonatas, concludes Duo Åstrand/Salo’s complete recording of Kuhlau’s violin sonatas.

The German composer Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832) fled to Denmark as a young man and with his strong cosmopolitan personality became a loner – and at the same time a key figure – in the Danish Golden Age. Kuhlau championed new tones in Danish music, and his melodically appealing violin sonatas were the first Danish sonatas in the Romantic style. With this recording Duo Åstrand/Salo lends new lustre to music that has only rarely been performed in our time.

Three very different violin sonatas are featured on this disc, reflecting the contrasting characteristics and standings of their respective composers. This release even includes a dvd with all three sonatas filmed on the stage of the concert hall in DR-Byen in Copenhagen.

The sonatas were composed almost at the same time – but in three different places in the world at that crucial time between the two World Wars. Ravel’s Sonata was composed in 1923-1927 in Paris, Bloch’s Poème Mystique in 1924 in the United States, and Janácek’s Sonata was written a little earlier in 1914 in Prague but didn’t receive its first performance until 1922.

The sonatas were met with harsh criticism during Nielsen's time for his rather abrupt and radical key changes, which must have been difficult to digest for audiences at the time. Nowadays, a change from A major to F minor hardly seems shocking; on the contrary, the frequent changes in color keep listeners' interest up throughout the sonatas.

Niels W. Gade (1817-1890) was beyond comparison the best known and most widely recognized Danish composer of the nineteenth century. He was an excellent violinist, and thus wrote many works for the violin. His fondness for the instrument is most in evidence in the works for violin and piano, among which the three sonatas trace Gade's stylistic development over 40 years: from youthful imagination in the early first sonata, through a firmer hand with the Classical-Romantic ideal of the period in the second, to the experienced, more rigorous Classical lines of the third and last, with none of the heavy scent of the Late Romanticism of the day.

Besides being one of the most versatile of Danish composers, Anders Koppel (b. 1947) is an outstanding musician in many genres. For this world premiere recording of his two double concertos Koppel has selected four outstanding soloists who express themselves in a wealth of well-written music with fine orchestral accompaniment. It is music that is at one and the same time entirely classical and entirely free.

Emil Hartmann (1836-1898) experienced great success when he toured Germany and the rest of Europe conducting his own works, and was often compared to the great Romantic masters of the European musical scene. But at home in Denmark the composer was overshadowed throughout his life by his famous father J.P.E. Hartmann. The writer Hans Christian Andersen actually said of the two Hartmanns that old Hartmann is a born composer, young Hartmann was brought up to it. With this recording of Emil Hartmann's three concertos - for violin, cello and piano - we can be in no doubt that the fame that Emil Hartmann enjoyed abroad was more than deserved.

Fini Henriques (1867-1940) was not only a well-loved violinist and popular composer, he was a cultural phenomenon. With unpretentious charm and great humanity he became the favourite musician of the Danes. His works radiate humor and an abundance of ideas. The music flowed easily from his pen, and he enjoyed unique success with orchestral music, especially the ballet Den Lille Havfrue (The Little Mermaid) and the theatre music for Vølund Smed (Wayland Smith).

Capriccio from 1878 is one of the last works by N. W. Gade. Originally composed for violin and piano and arranged for violin and orchestra by German composer, Carl von Reinecke. An elegant virtuoso piece. Axel Gade was a brilliant violinist, from 1910 concertmaster in The Royal Opera and furthermore a wellknown soloist. He studied with Joseph Joachim in Berlin. As a composer he lived in the shadows of his famous father N. W. Gade, and today most of his production has been forgotten. His second violin concerto from 1899 is a brilliant and highly romantic work. The solo part is very well written for the instrument and the concerto is full of inspiration and passion.

Brahms’s Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano, Op. 40 (1864–5) was the first significant work for this particular instrumental combination – and, although it has had some distinguished successors, has remained supreme in the genre it established. György Ligeti has called Brahms’s work one which ‘floats in the celestial spheres of the musical heaven as the incomparable example of this category of chamber music’. The very fact that Ligeti felt the urge to enter this category himself suggests the significant position his own Trio (1982) holds in his output. It signals a turn away from his more radically avant-garde music of the previous quarter- century towards a more ‘classical’ approach in which he accepted, though very much on his own terms, traditional genres, more familiar elements of tonality and expressivity, and echoes of Hungarian folk music.

TRIBUTES-Pulse is a collaboration between American filmmaker Bill Morrison (b. 1965) and Danish composer and percussionist Simon Christensen (b. 1971).

Through image and sound Morrison and Christensen have created a requiem for the 20th century - the persistence of a pulse, the contractions of the heart.

The Danish Horn Trio brilliantly displays three of today's leading Danish composers' work with the horn trio phenomenon: Poul Ruders, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and Søren Nils Eichberg. All three composers on this CD clearly nod to the genre's legacy by Brahms and Ligeti, and all are profoundly inspired by the transparent soundscape of the three fundamentally different instruments - one bowed, one blown and one struck. However, there are no direct lines connecting the three composers. Each is a distinctive artist who likes to speak with a clear, assured voice - in his own mother tongue. Thus the horn trio becomes a medium through which we can sense varied facets of Danish and international musical history.

Chamber music forms only a minute part of Claude Debussy´s collected work. For the genre he only composed eight works which illustrate none the less, and despite the paucity in number, the development in his tonal language in a fascinating way.