Includes work(s) by various composers. Soloists: Vicki Boeckman, Genie Johnsson, Pia Brinch Jensen, Karina Agerbo.

Bent Sørensen's music can feel like the product of a dream, at once vague and precise, present and intangible. With Rosenblad and Pantomime, the recording of Sørensen's trilogy Papillons is complete. This is music filled with the ebb and flow of fear, hope and nostalgia and unified by common musical material through the same anchoring piano part across it's movements. All works including the Fantasia Appassionata for solo piano are written for Katrine Gislinge, Sørensen's wife and one of the most significant pianists in Scandinavia, here accompanied by Esbjerg Ensemble and the Stenhammar Quartet. All of the pieces on this release are premiere recordings, and are being released at the same time that Sørensen will receive the prestigious Grawemeyer Award.

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.

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.

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)

It is magic through transparency. The music of Hans Abrahamsen, dark yet alluringly innocent, exhibits a pure, strong naivete that opens up into a genuine magical world of both the bright and the sombre kind. Performing two of his early works - Six Pieces for horn trio and his first string quartet 10 Preludes - Ensemble MidtVest brings out Abrahamsen's characteristic clear, precise tone. The same clarity inhabits his arrangements of Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies and Carl Nielsen's Fantasy Pieces, exploring and evoking the original works in a new, unmistakably Abrahamsenesque way.

Per Nørgard is one of the most frequently played composers of his generation. He has written more than 400 works in all genres and inspired innumerable colleagues in Denmark and abroad. This album presents all of Nørgard's music for the Oscar winning Babette's Feast film version by Gabriel Axel of Karen Blixen's short story - not just the snatches of it one can hear in the film. One can also get to know the hypnotic Spell, the ripples and bubbles in Whirl's World and Trio Breve, which according to the composer himself are to be regarded as three as short expressive phrases - dream-like pictures - that change between light and dark, fast and slow but with introvert melodic features in common.

Duo Åstrand/Salo follow up their first installment of sonatas by Friedrich Kuhlau with a selection of some of the composer’s most impressive works for violin and piano. Friedrich Kuhlau 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. In 1813 Kuhlau was granted Danish citizenship and the honorary title of Royal Court Musician. Included on this release is what some consider the first Danish violin sonata in the Romantic style, a work that glances towards the composer’s idol Beethoven but contains plenty of individual spice and allure. It is followed by sonatas in all but name, the Trois Duos brillants from late in Kuhlau’s career. They are brilliant, as the title suggests – three varied, evocative snapshots of the great cosmopolitan of Denmark’s Golden Age.

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REVIEW:

Kuhlau’s music sounds thoroughly Germanic, and he makes no attempt to develop a Danish national style. He is definitely one of the best composers of his era, though; and it wouldn’t be until Schumann in the early 1850s that anyone would write better for violin and piano.

– American Record Guide

During his own lifetime, Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000) became the very symbol of modern music in Denmark. An unstoppable creative force which, right from his breakthrough in the early 1940s, was in a category of his own, Per Salo, the pre-eminent Danish interpreter of Bentzon, here turns to Bentzon’s huge-scale piano cycle The Tempered Piano, with a personal compilation of preludes and fugues from the many volumes that Bentzon wrote with direct inspiration from Bach. Riotous digressions, musical worlds of unbridled fantasy, loosely constructed blowholes – everywhere Bentzon broke new ground – ground far from the golden mean.

MUSIC INSPIRED BY HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN'S FAIRY-TALES

Elverskud (The Elf-King's Daughter) is a dramatic cantata from 1854, based on Danish medieval ballads. It became one of Niels W. Gade's greatest successes, not only in his native Denmark but throughout Europe, where Elverskud was performed several hundred times, often conducted by Gade himself. Gade was especially admired in Germany, and on this album, Elverskud is not only played on period instruments for the first time but is also sung for the first time with the German text that brought the work international fame. Here the cantata is put together with Gade's breakthrough as an a capella composer, Funf Gesange from 1846, also in German. Perhaps this danish national composer isn't so danish after all. These works are beautifully performed by soloists Sophie Junker, Ivonne Fuchs, and Johannes Weisser, alongside the Danish National Vocal Ensemble.

This album is a unique collaboration between the young Danish composer Kasper Rofelt and accordionist Bjarke Mogensen, to whom all works on this premiere recording were dedicated. From the intimate Nightsongs to the colorful Light Falling, this CD offers both solo and chamber works with a variety of musical characters and idioms. "Bjarke Mogensen is an astonishment on record. Once heard, never forgotten" - the Arts Journal, New York 2011.

ALVAREZ / NORHOLD / EICHBERG: Music for Recorder, Saxophone,

"There are so many musical gems on this release that, as a curious listener, you should indulge yourself and become acquainted with these concertos." - Christian Times, Denmark

"Subtle interpretive qualities and restraint combined with an abundantly accessible melody in tonal anchoring makes Koppel's music immediately appealing to the listener." - Upsala Nya Tidning, Sweden

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Anders Koppel (b. 1947) is to a rare degree a composer of his time. With one foot firmly planted in the classical European musical tradition and the other in world music, rock and jazz, Anders Koppel's career as a composer can be seen as one long continuous mission to unite these cultures in a contemporary musical idiom. This has resulted in a long succession of original works, all bearing the mark of a special ability to communicate emotions and energy, powerfully and straightforwardly, between musicians and audience.

The music on this CD confirms the special position of the composer Jorgen Jersild (1913-2004) in Danish music. It is captivating chamber music written over a half-century during which the composer underwent great musical development, but at the same time persisted in his own personal style - from the early works from the 1930s and 1940s to the later string quartet showing US a courageous, mature composer seeking out new musical areas.

NIELSEN: Chamber Music, Vol. 1

HARTMANN: Overtures

Recording information: Carl Nielsen Academy of Music (08/16/2008-08/17/2008); Carl Nielsen Academy of Music (09/20/2008).

Heise, Weyse and Lange-Müller: Love Songs

Koppel: Works for Cello & Piano

RUDERS: Kafka's Trial (Proces Kafka, Prozess Kafka)

PALSCHAU Harpsichord Concertos: No. 1 in C; No. 2 in D. SCHULZ 6 Diverses pièces pour le clavecin ou le pianoforte • Lars Ulrik Mortensen (hpd), cond; Concerto Copenhagen (period instruments) • dacapo 8.226040 (67:08)


The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians contains but a brief paragraph on Johann Gottfried Wilhelm Palschau (1741–1815). In it we learn that he was a member of the orchestra at Copenhagen’s Royal Opera. Among other things, Palschau toured extensively, visiting London a decade before Mozart (the notes tell us that Palschau lodged in the same house as Wolferl), and Hamburg in1761. In 1771 Palschau turns up in Riga, where he studied for a time with Johann Gottfried Müthel. Palschau settled in St. Petersburg (Russia) in 1771 and became highly successful as a performer. The annotations for the CD indicate that Palschau’s last documented concert was in 1800, when a German singer—H. C. Wunder—advertised in the Gazette de Saint-Pétersbourg that he had managed to acquire the services of the famous piano virtuoso, Herr Palschau.


As for Johann Abraham Peter Schulz (1747–1800), there is much more information. He was a German who studied in Berlin with C. P. E. Bach and Johann Philipp Kirnberger. Schulz was a staunch advocate of “new” music and staged operas by Gluck, Niccolò Piccinni, and others, but this got Schulz in the doghouse at Rheinsburg. Feeling it was time to move on, Schulz applied for and was appointed to a position in Copenhagen (1787–1795). There he reorganized the Royal Chapel, founded a benefit fund for musicians’ widows, wrote extensively on music education, and continued to compose. Schulz was highly influential in Denmark, and has been called a pioneer in that nation’s musical development.


This CD contains all of Palschau’s harpsichord concertos, his only other surviving compositions being several sets of variations on Russian folk songs. While not as highly developed as the concertos of his slightly older contemporary, Haydn. Palschau’s concertos are pleasant and uncomplicated works, showing more the influence of his Berlin studies with C. P. E. Bach and less of Müthel. The keyboard-writing is impressive and demanding, yet rewarding.


The title of the six pieces by Schulz indicates the changing musical times when the harpsichord was gradually being pushed aside for the more expressive fortepiano . The editor of the collection, Michael Struck, points out that the scope of the pieces is best illustrated by the difference between the Baroque character of opening prelude and the cantabile style of the melody found in the Andante.


Concerto Copenhagen, or CoCo as it is affectionately known, was founded in 1991; since 1999, Lars Ulrik Mortensen has been its artistic director. CoCo has released a number of important recordings that combine the more esoteric Scandinavian repertoire with the staples of the Baroque and Classic eras. The performances are benchmark from first note to last, compelling admiration via their seamless delivery and unforced stylistic grace. The bottom line is the music and musicians fulfill their mission: to open another chapter in music history and to spell pleasure from beginning to end.


While none of the material here will rival Haydn or Mozart, it is decidedly delightful and relaxing fare that is ideal for an occasional journey into the musical undergrowth. Bon voyage!


FANFARE: Michael Carter

BORRESEN: Kongelige Gaest (Den) (The Royal Guest)

Ruders, P.: 4 Dances

NORGARD: Nuit des Hommes