This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

The story, to the extent the work has one, is simple: God gives the Antikrist a few days to wreak havoc on a sinful world, and the actual opera consists of a series of vignettes in which the minions of the Antikrist give vent to their various forms of nastiness...and order is restored in the end...it's easy to understand why many listeners will simply want to enjoy the music and leave it at that. For make no mistake, considered purely as music, this is stunning.


With characters like The Scarlet Beast, Hatred, Despondency, and (my own personal favorite) The Great Whore, how can you not love an opera like Antikrist? Langgaard was one sick puppy, and posterity can only be glad of that fact. Among his other quirks of character, he married a woman he hated in order to please his mother, walked out of the church immediately after the ceremony, and (evidently) never slept with his bride. But he also never left her. All of that was in the future when he was working on Antikrist in his early 20s, but the tension between the self-mortification, repressed but intense eroticism, and the need to affirm traditional spiritual values, makes for an explosive artistic mixture. The music takes Strauss' Salome as its starting point, but turns into something wholly original and no less gorgeous along the way to its hopeful apotheosis.

The story, to the extent the work has one, is simple: God gives the Antikrist a few days to wreak havoc on a sinful world, and the actual opera consists of a series of vignettes in which the minions of the Antikrist give vent to their various forms of nastiness. Essentially a morality play viewed from a modern angle, there isn't much action, and order is restored in the end. But the libretto is basically incomprehensible (no, that isn't a bad translation from the Danish that you are reading), and it's the music that tells that tale; not much actually happens on stage. So although the theatrical production presented at the same time as this recording was made (also available from Dacapo on DVD) did successfully realize the piece as a mesmerizing dramatic experience, it's easy to understand why many listeners will simply want to enjoy the music and leave it at that.


For make no mistake, considered purely as music, this is stunning. As with the live DVD, the performance is extraordinary and extremely well engineered to boot. There are some very fine Danish opera singers out there, including Camilla Nylund and Anna-Margrethe Dahl, both of whom made such a positive impression in Dacapo's recording of Ruder's A Handmaid's Tale--but then there are absolutely no weak links in the cast. Having made this recording in connection with live performances, all of the singers sound completely comfortable with what in fact are far from conventional parts. The orchestra under Thomas Dausgaard plays magnificently, and if you didn't get the DVD, or even if you did but want to hear the music in even more opulent sound, then this hybrid SACD is certainly the way to go. Antikrist had to wait decades for its first performance, and decades more for one truly worthy of Langgaard's warped genius; but the wait has certainly been worth it. [10/23/2006]
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Both Scriabin and Langgaard believed that through their music they could pave the way for a spiritual revolution. The piano offered a perfect and very intimate medium for their highly personal harmonic and expressive vocabularies. Scriabin drew on daemonic associations in his Piano Sonata No. 9 to liberate the old tonal system, whereas Langgaard explored his youthful fascination with Catholicism in music of fanaticism and ecstasy. Langgaard’s The Flame Chambers and Scriabin’s Vers la flamme are feverish musical twins that exemplify both composers’ explosive intensity.

Apocalyptic and paradisiac visions of good and evil meet aphoristic miniatures of nine small, mainly malignant insects. The rousing graphic imagery of Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) is on full display in this third volume of piano works by the deeply original Danish composer. Including three world premiere recordings, Berit Johansen Tange captures the mysterious forces, poetic gracefulness and absurd hysteria that are all part of Langgaard's both dark and wondrous expression.

Rued Langgaard’s (1893-1952) inner division can be experienced at its extreme in the chamber music written between 1913 and 1924, in which the secure world of his youth is undercut by a dark musical understream. This is most apparent in the work for piano, Music of the Abyss, which is presented here in a transcription for chamber ensemble by Allan Gravgaard Madsen (born 1984) of which this is the first recording. This meeting between Langgaard and Gravgaard brings to a climax the work’s view of modern man’s destructive strength in a crazy ride towards the abyss.

The Danish late-romantic composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) composed songs during his whole career. The 18 songs, all new to the discography, were mainly set to poems by German poets and here sung in German by tenor Jens Krogsgaard. The five Erotic poems , taking up the last part of this fascinating sung recital, are all by the Danish poet Vilhelm Krag, with beautiful lines like ‘Once again, I see you, When you arrive and In the wondrous, blond nights.’ Accompanist Jan Ole Christiansen tackles the often very demanding piano part with virtuosity and together with Jens Krogsgaard they deliver a truly magnificent song recital. The hallmark of Jens Krogsgaard is his ability to create strong authentic characters on stage, combining strong skills both as an actor and as a singer. He made his debut at The Royal Opera in Copenhagen in 2002 as Captain Vere in Billy Budd, with considerable success. Since 2009 he has been a voice teacher at The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.