Making important decisions can be complicated. It can also be perfectly simple. Most of the time, though, it seems like it is both. Echoing such intertwined feelings of doubt and clarity, Niels Ronsholdt (b. 1978) presents a unique song cycle full of mirrors, sensitivity and undaunted experimentation. The music included on this release transcends the boundaries between classical and pop music. The work stood out at both November Music Festival 2015 (Holland) and SPOR Festival 2016 (Denmark), receiving the biggest audience applause at both festivals. Niels Ronsholdt teaches composition alongside fellow composer Simon Steen-Andersen at the Danish Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, the former home of composers such as Per Norgard and Bent Sorensen. Of Ronsholdt’s previous release, Nordische Musik gave five stars and wrote: “Me Quitte is anything but difficult avant-garde music: it is emotional, fragile, moving, dreamlike, and yes, even charming.”

12 Studies' forms a three-way journey through composer Bo Gunge’s (b. 1964) own life of music, a range of human moods and a series of western music’s most tantalizing intervals. All twelve pieces, characterized by their simplicity and expressive clarity, are performed in both solo and duo versions; through this mirror the music shows its duality, born of a solid idea but let loose – uninhibited and free. In a widespread 2016 vote, Danish radio listeners at P2 Classical chose a choral piece by Bo Gunge as their favorite piece of new music composed after 2000. This is Gunge’s first release on the Dacapo label.

If you don’t know Danish composer Ole Buck, you’ve been missing something special. His music is approachable, imaginative, often nature-inspired, and crafted with remarkable precision. Each of these pieces is written for a different number of instruments or players (the notes unfortunately don’t tell us which ones), and each of them matters. Buck is a master of musical timing (the notes do say that, and it’s the truth). In Fiori di ghiaccio (Ice Flowers), for example, just when you think all nine players have made a contribution, in comes a trumpet injecting a new flash of color (and melody).

A Tree, for thirteen musicians, predictably features some wooden percussion, but nothing else about the piece follows conventional paths. The title is the only naive thing about it. [Untitled], for eight instruments, is the most austere work here, and also the shortest, but it’s also incredibly imaginative. It’s a sort of “Pictures at an Exhibition” dedicated to paintings that are, as you might have guessed, untitled. Use your imagination. Flower Ornament Music, for seventeen instruments, is a major statement. There are, perhaps, Asian overtones in the central section, with its crashing tam-tam, and the ebullient closing minutes have minimalist overtones, but there’s nothing really like it in the modern repertoire.

The performances sound totally at home with the idiom; the players clearly relish their solo opportunities, and conductor Jesper Nordin has a good feel for the music’s carefully gauged pacing. Great sound, and just a great disc.

– ClassicsToday (David Hurwitz)

The five composers behind these world premiere recordings, written for the young classical guitarist Jakob Bangso, all share a keen interest in the field of electroacoustic music. Through live electronics, sound-transforming algorithms and interactive systems, CONNECT explores captivating soundscapes in the borderlands between the acoustic and the digital, the raw and the processed, the heard and the reheard - guitar and electronics are equal partners. The prizewinning guitarist Jakob Bangso (b. 1988) has quickly established himself as one of Denmark's most active and versatile instrumentalists. He graduated from the soloist class of the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus with Frederik Munk Larsen as his teacher and from the Hochschule fur Musik und Tanz in Cologne, Germany under Roberto Aussel. As a soloist he has made a particular impact at international guitar competitions, and has been awarded several grants and scholarships. In 2015 he was the first guitarist ever to receive the two-year career grant The Young Elite from the Danish Arts Foundation.

So the album is now a reality with, first, the original work and then 11 very different remixes or new compositions inspired by the work. As We Like We mention in a note on their contribution, and which is also mentioned in the introduction to the work, Else Marie Pade wrote a programme note when the work was released, saying among other things: 'The first sound is set in motion, is caught up by the next, which is caught up by the next, etc., in a powerful crescendo.' That is the spirit in which the album is created: the original work was the first sound that is caught up by the next sound in the form of the next remix, which is in turn caught up by the next remix, and so on. Thanks to every single contributor on this tribute album for the musical will to pay tribute to Else Marie, for commitment, for dialogue, for inventiveness and not least for responsiveness to the many potentials of the original." - Henrik Marstal.

The viola occupies a special place in the psyche of musicians and composers. It is an instrument of mystery, soulfulness and even of protest and revolt. Rafaell Altino, principal viola of the Odense Symphony Orchestra, presents this exploration of his instrument's power and possibilities as realized by six leading Danish composers. Some explore the viola as a tool for sound production while others relish what it's distinctive also singing voice does to melodies. The results are as touching and warm as they are fearsome and defiant. All works on this release are commissioned by and dedicated to Altino by Danish composers, including Grawemeyer Award winner Bent Sorensen. Liner notes have been provided by Andrew Mellor, journalist and critic with a particular interest in the culture and music of Denmark and the Nordic countries.

As a composer, Simon Christensen received his education at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and at the Conservatoire de Paris. His music has been performed in his native country, Denmark, and abroad, counting commissions by Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Athelas Sinfonietta and more. Simon is an active musician in his own duo Mono Duo, he performs on the zither, a handful of percussion instruments and a small arsenal of analogue modules. "... would just like to say that Simon Christensen's string quartet Manifest - Bust There's No Need to Shout, which I heard this afternoon at Frederiksberg Palace Chapel, was a revelation. A work that played for more than an hour without dramatic progression and without ascending and descending motions... " - Jexper Holmen, composer

A computer is connected to a massive pipe organ and robot musicians take control for the next 60 minutes – without human intervention. California-born composer Wayne Siegel (b. 1953) is a pioneer of computer-based music. In his work Celebration, the four manuals of the Hallgrímskirkja pipe organ in Reykjavík are controlled by four virtual musicians, all of them eager to express themselves individually but also programmed to perform together. Icelandic hymns and live-data from a weather satellite are interpreted by the virtual musicians playing the pipe organ, embedding human culture and the climate of our planet in everything they say. Wayne Siegel is a composer, professor of electronic music and director of DIEM (the Danish Institute for Electronic Music) in Aarhus. Siegel was born in Los Angeles and came to Denmark in 1974 to study composition with Per Norgard. Since then Siegel has lived in Denmark, where from the beginning of the 1980s he has pioneered the development of electronic music and computer-based composition.

The idea of building great music from modest or fragmentary means has characterized the work of Nordic composers for generations. In Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen’s music, that idea finds a particularly exquisite and absolutely contemporary expression. In Toccata the music glances towards a filmic chase-down, whereas Nielsen in Ophelia Dances claims to ‘hear the dancing’ of that fragile character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The album concludes with Nielsen’s single-movement symphony, Symphony No. 3, which sets in motion a cumulative journey upwards from low to high: a symphonic Tower of Babel, reaching for the heavens. All of the works on this release are world premiere recordings, and the album is being released to mark Svend Hvidfelt Nielsen’s 60th birthday. Nielsen is also a gifted church organist, and on this album he plays the organ solo part in the Toccata.

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REVIEW:

The Ophelia Dances is certainly strange and interesting music, more “ambient” in sound but still well structured beneath its odd sonorities. Though apparently a continuous work, it is clearly composed in discrete movements, placing the accordion in the midst of bitonal swirls of sound and pungent brass and string interjections.

The Symphony No. 3, written in 2010, uses a sort of musical “big bang” at the outset, followed by “stuttering fragments” which “muster to initiate the development of the symphony’s vertical structure, supported by foundations in the form of tectonic pedal notes.” This is indeed a technical description of what happens, but the listening process is more emotional and therefore more fascinating.

A strange sort of album, then, yet fascinating and certainly worth a listen!

– Arts Music Lounge

Trio Ismena guides us through a fascinating collection including world premiere recordings of contemporary works showcasing the diversity of the vanguard of Danish contemporary composers.

The Danish composer Martin Lohse (b. 1971) writes contemporary music drawing on musical history. The sensitive elegance of Baroque and Romanticism meet the rigorous certainty of Minimalism - a simplicity of expression approaching the insisting and touching which is evident in all three works on this album. They are thus written with the featured artists in mind, fronted by the pianist David Lau Magnussen with the Danish Chamber Players (Ensemble Storstr�m) and an exclusive team of instrumentalists. Martin Lohse is not only a composer; he is also a visual artist and poet. These forms of artistic expression as such need not have anything to do with one another, although the man behind them is the same; but Lohse engages in what appears to be a consistent, fruitful dialogue between expressiveness and a structural, theoretical approach to this urge to express himself. The music by Lohse hangs in front of the listener as independent figures- mobiles- and although they constantly show new sides of themselves one recognizes them easily. The music provides references to the dance suites of the Baroque through the elegance of the Rococo and the emotional outbursts of Romanticism to the rhythmic swing and motif repetitions of Minimalism.

On this album, two of Denmark's most exciting young ensembles, Ekkozone and Alpha, join forces in exhilarating performances of the Danish composer Peter Navaroo-Alonso's original response to two Vivaldi masterpieces, the iconic Four Seasons and the Concerto in Si minore, just one of the many virtuosic violin concertos from the great Baroque master's hand. Both works are influenced by Navarro-Alonso's great interest in classic electroacoustic effects such as delay, loop, acceleration and deceleration. In Si minore he directly uses tape and loop pedal in three of the movements; in Quattro Stagioni he imitates the effects acoustically. Alpha is a unique Danish ensemble, founded by Bolette Roed, Peter Navarro-Alonso, and David Hildebrandt. As early as 2003, they were the first group to explore the interesting instrument combination of recorder, saxophone, and percussion, attracted by it's many possibilities. Ekkozone was formed in 2013 and quickly became a household name at Copenhagen Jazz-house. Ekkozone stands for classical avant-garde, minimalism, and cross-over, consisting of Scandinavian and British musicians in various formations, led by percussionist and conductor Mathias Reumert.

Niels Ronsholdt (b. 1978) is a composer and sound artist. He studied composition with Karl Aage Rasmussen and Bent Sorensen at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. He writes installations, chamber music, and experimental operas. Ronsholdt’s song cycle Me Quitte focuses on love, which is not always a liberating good- it is frequently the source of human degradation and misery. Faroese singer Anna Katrin Egilstrod and the Danish ensemble Scenatet bring this cycle to life in this world premiere recording.

The fusion - or "alliage" - of French sonorities with Nordic structural thinking gives Niels Rosing-Schow's works a special position in Danish and international music. His music mixes Nordic light, golden phrasing, a keen sense of resonance and musical layers that illuminate one another - all seasoned with a feeling for giving the music content and weight. The six new works on this CD and Rosing-Schow's 'classic' Ritus I from 1991 are premiered on this CD by a selection of Denmark's leading interpreters of contemporary music today.

The tall, vocally hardy baritone Morten Frank Larsen, in his Met debut, was wonderful. the New York Times - March 2011 Erotic Hymns (1998) is a sacred song cycle in which composer Bent Lorentzen (b. 1935) combines Baroque and contemporary Danish poetry in a fascinating exploration of the relationship between erotic and religious experience. This world premiere recording by baritone Morten Frank Larsen and organist Jens E. Christensen also features three of Lorentzen's major organ works and concludes with a chorale motet cycle, balancing the CD in beautiful symmetry.