As pianist, conductor and composer, Ole Schmidt was one of the great polymaths of the Nordic musical world. His music was influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky and the French school and is underpinned by a certain Nordic clarity. It combines rhythmic energy, high concentration, elemental expressivity and deadpan humor. Schmidt's experience on the podium gave him an inside track on the working of the orchestra, and his pragmatism and refinement are evident in his larger scores, including the three momentous concertos on this album. In his Pièce Concertante, Schmidt places a trumpet and a trombone in the foreground. The piece has a bustling concerto grosso atmosphere and a consistent good humor. The album also presents his Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra, which explore the full expressive capabilities of the tuba, and the Concerto for Horn and Chamber Orchestra consisting of two contrasting movements: the first serious and dreaming, the second fast and playfully light.

Despite being eccentric and at odds with his fellow human beings for most of his life, Danish composer Rued Langgaard was convinced that his time would come – and so it did. In Langgaard’s Symphony No. 1, we find its teenage composer celebrating his love of beauty and harmony in the most hedonistic terms. With this recording the symphony sees it return home, performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker, the first orchestra that understood what a masterpiece perhaps the greatest talent that had ever been seen in Danish music had created.

REVIEWS:

Unjustly misunderstood, and at times even ridiculed or dismissed as an eccentric kook by critics of his day, Danish organist and composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) deserves to be ranked alongside Wagner, Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Mahler and the like.

Brilliantly orchestrated for large orchestra, with motivic and thematic development on par with the music of Gustav Mahler [the First Symphony's] final movement alone is a revelry of ideas brought together to great effect. Seriously, if the five or so minutes near the end don't capture your full attention, and the final minute doesn't leave you slack-jawed in amazement, maybe you should check your pulse. In this live recording of the world premiere recording of the 2010 critical edition by Bendt Viinholt Nielsen, conductor Sakari Oramo and the members of the Berlin Philharmonic certainly seem to be having the time of their lives.

-- Classical Music Sentinel

A Gramophone Editor's Pick, Shortlisted for the 2022 Gramophone Awards

Recommended by MusicWeb International

A Boston Globe Best Classical Album of 2022

Hans Abrahamsen's Schnee (Snow, 2008) is a gorgeous marvel which encapsulates winter. The instrumental cycle, already a classic of the twenty-first century, comprises a set of ten canons making up an hour of ghostly, feathery music. There is no hurrying, but great depth. As Abrahamsen himself says: ‘In Schnee, a single moment is stretched as far as possible. At some point, the music disappears. There is just a breath of air left’. Founded in 1972, Lapland Chamber Orchestra is the most northerly professional chamber orchestra in Finland and indeed in the entire EU. The orchestra has 18 full-time members and its Artistic Director is conductor John Storgårds. The first ever Principal Guest Conductor, for 2019-2021, is Tomas Djupsjöbacka. Based in Rovaniemi, the orchestra is a regional orchestra that regularly tours the Province of Lapland, but also performs elsewhere in Finland and abroad. The orchestra has performed in festivals such as Savonlinna Opera Festival, Helsinki Festival, the Korsholma Music Festival and the LuostoClassic event. The latest tours abroad have taken the orchestra to Canada, Hungary, Austria, Algeria and the BBC Proms in London.

"The sounds Abrahamsen craves...translucent across a large range of actual expression, hugely complex on the page but delectably simple to the ear, are exceptionally realized and recorded here." -Gramophone

Review

...for a number of years after 1990 [the Danish composer Hans] Abrahamsen composed hardly anything, finding himself in a compositional impasse. The present work Schnee (snow), is one of those with he found his way out of this impasse, and it has been widely admired. However, Abrahamsen’s biggest success so far has been with his 2013 song cycle Let me tell you, using the words of Ophelia from Hamlet. This won the Grawemeyer Award and was voted the greatest classical composition of the twentyfirst century by a poll of critics in 2019.

During his compositional silence, Abrahamsen busied himself with arrangements of the music of other composers, including Bach. He was particularly intrigued by Bach’s set of Canons BWV 1072-8, which he arranged with the aim of repeating them again and again. This gave him the idea of writing his own music using canonic techniques. When he received a commission to write a work for a festival in 2006 he wrote what became the opening two movements of Schnee. The whole work is organised as a set of paired canons, each having an a and a b version. There are also three Intermezzi. Abrahamsen thought of each pair of canons as together forming a third, three-dimensional piece. He also thought of stereoscopic pictures, which two nearly identical pictures give the impression of depth to the viewer.

Each pair of canons is shorter than its predecessor. Furthermore, the ensemble is divided into two groups: sitting on either side of the percussionist on the left we have the strings: violin, viola, cello and one piano. On the right are the woodwind: flute (doubling piccolo and alto flute), oboe (doubling cor anglais), clarinet (doubling E flat and bass clarinet) and a second piano. These are used in contrasting ways. There are also strong contrasts in pace. In the three intermezzi, the wind and stringed instruments are tuned down slightly, creating interference patterns with the pianos, which have normal tuning.

So much for the technicalities of the work, though one could go on a good deal longer about them. What does it sound like? Well, it begins very quietly, so quietly in fact that at first I thought there was something wrong with my equipment. There are very high violin notes and then a melody picked out on the piano. The second set of canons moves rapidly, like walking through swirling snow. The fourth set uses the same sleigh-bells which Mozart used in his Sleigh Ride (Die Schlittenfahrt) from his Three German Dances K. 605. The fifth set uses the device Bach exploited in Contrapunctus 13 from The Art of Fugue of two pieces, one of which is the inversion of the other. At the end, the music just disappears. The work is completely absorbing and gripping and creates a unique atmosphere.

It is beautifully recorded; I was listening in ordinary two-channel stereo, but this is a SACD and should sound even better in that medium. There are helpful sleevenotes, in English and Danish, from which I have borrowed, and altogether this is a memorable disc.

--MusicWeb International (Stephen Barber)

With his symphonies, the Danish composer�Rued Langgaard�offered 16 vastly different versions of what a symphony can be. His captivating, complex genius made room for all conceivable idioms and a wealth of styles ranging from the grandiosely Late Romantic to the purest Absurdism. This box is the first collected recording of Langgaard's 16 symphonies based on the critical edition of the scores; recordings which demonstrate, with spectacular sound quality, Langgaards masterly grasp of the orchestra and his ecstatic view of art: "Mr. Dausgaard's keen advocacy elicits polished, persuasive accounts that live up to Langgaard's motto:�Long Live Beauty", wrote The New York Times.

This album is nothing short of a sensation: it shows Else Marie Pade (1924–2016) in a hitherto unknown role as an orchestral composer. Although these are only a few works, their artistic weight and the quality and integrity she brings to her orchestral works, provide ample reason to challenge her established image. With this album, it will be equally legitimate to label her as an 'acoustic' composer as it has been to call her an 'electronic' composer in the past.

Atrium, Danish cellist and composer Josefine Opsahl's (b. 1992) debut for Dacapo Records, is a strikingly original statement, focusing on her own music. The title has two definitions: one biological, one architectural. Out of their collision, Opsahl draws a reverberating series of dualities: soft/hard, organic/manufactured, natural/cultural. These are expressed most fundamentally in her distinctive instrumental set-up of cello and live electronics, which allows her to build entire orchestras of electronically modified and duplicated cellos live and in response to her acoustic playing.

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (1932-2016) managed to unite every faction of progressive Danish music in admiration. After their acclaimed first volume in this new chronological cycle of the composer's complete string quartets, the Nordic String Quartet arrive at the works that reveal the composer's musical imagination in all it's unbridled joy, brilliance and eccentricity. Works spanning 27 years, including three written for the world-famous Kronos Quartet, see the composer toying with form, sparring with nature and grappling with seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

For her second volume of Kuhlau’s piano music, Marie-Luise Bodendorff takes the three previously unrecorded rondos, Op. 1, as her starting point, some of his most charming and distinctive music. She continues with the composer’s six sonatinas, Op. 55, which remain popular with pianists today. In the Fantasy on Swedish songs, Op. 93, Bodendorff displays all the craftsmanship, elegance and kindness of Kuhlau’s piano music. Friedrich Kuhlau fled from Germany to Denmark at the age of 24, when facing conscription into Napoleon’s army. He easily worked his way into the Danish musical and aristocratic milieu, gained citizenship and spent the rest of his life in the country. Kuhlau is known as Beethoven’s strongest advocate in Denmark. His piano music is melodically rich, explores the full sonority of the instrument and ranges in texture from the delicate to the imposing.

Vagn Holmboe (1909-96) stands as one of the greatest 20th-century composers of string quartets, with a monumental series of 21 quartets demonstrating his distinctive metamorphosis method. Holmboe's vibrant and organic quartet works are profoundly rooted in a Buddhist inspired perspective on life, an outlook which, though he kept it private, led him to view all manifestations of life as part of a cosmic whole. Equally essential is the influence from folk music. This third volume of the acclaimed Nightingale String Quartet series captures Holmboe at the peak of his creativity, with his musical metamorphosis practice fully flourishing.

There is, naturally, only a small region which sings in Danish. The psalms sung by religious communities during the time of the Reformation in Denmark were, for the most part, borrowed from other languages and used with existing melodies. With this recording, the Copenhagen based vocal ensemble Musica Ficta explores the Danish Reformation hymnody from an international perspective, with links to European musical works from the 16th century. Musica Ficta is a professional vocal ensemble, founded in 1996 by the composer and conductor Bo Holten. With this group he has realized his vision of a highly flexible ensemble, where the classical Oxbridge early music ideal is combined with the warmth of the Scandinavian choral sound.

For a period of ten years, the trio Mikkelborg Riessler Siegel gathered for an annual summer ritual under open skies in the iconic sculpture park at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Here, a shared musical voice emerged, of electronic textures, new chamber music, and free improvisation, in a genre without a name, shaped by it's surroundings and by time. This album brings together five works where the rhythms of nature, human fragility, and the presence of art merge into evocative sonic tableaus.

Christmas is a time of music and togetherness. With warmth, intimacy, and distinct roots in Nordic folk traditions, Dybfolt reimagines beloved songs of the season - from Danish classics to Nordic treasures - where winter's quiet reflection meets the vibrant spirit of folk music.

Spanning her debut in the 1890s to the esoteric vision of her later years, this world premiere recording features a superb line-up of rising Danish singers, breathing life into Tekla Griebel Wandall's (1869-1953) vivid songs. From the macabre irony of a -Heinrich Heine setting to the profound emotional journey of J.P. Jacobsen's poetry, Wandall grapples with seemingly irreconcilable opposites while toying with both form and feeling.

Prodigiously gifted Danish composer and pianist Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000) wrote nearly 1,000 musical works in every known classical genre and style. He retained a constantly questing and exploratory nature throughout his life, as we can hear in his five known wind quintets, recorded here by The Carl Nielsen Quintet. The results are captivating in their own way, stoked by Bentzon’s distinctive, virtuosic language and great ingenuity. The Carl Nielsen Quintet is a young Danish ensemble formed in 2006. The members have positions in Danish and Swedish symphony orchestras alongside their career in the quintet.

Every sound in Bent Sørensen's music has been considered with the greatest care and refinement. His quietly spoken universe incorporates loneliness, nostalgia and a feeling of loss and leave-taking. His triple concerto, L’Isola della Città (2015), has a purity that makes it one of Sørensen’s most immediate and gripping orchestral works. As he has said, 'this music unfolds at night, as most of my music does, because it was written at night’. The concerto's solo parts are performed by Trio con Brio Copenhagen who has played Sørensen's music extensively. Sørensen’s Second Symphony (2019) is a ‘classic’ symphony. The work dives into the resonance of music’s history: the imagination showers itself in melodies, sounds and structures while at the same time, from a rational perspective, it can be seen both from outside and from a distance.

REVIEWS:

Sørenson is a composer whose pieces strike me as truly dreamlike. There is often a core of something familiar, tonal, pleasing at its heart, but it is also layered over with distortions and inflections that make it less familiar. One might say that it takes something attractive and comfortable and renders it uncanny.

The two works here fall very much into this description. L’Isola della Cittá is a sort of concerto grosso for piano trio and orchestra. It is more intimate, poetic, and the contrasts and juxtapositions are more extreme, even though they are subtly modulated. (The “island” of the title is the composer’s home in Copenhagen; one senses the world constantly encroaching on the precious quiet of the creative space). The symphony, not surprisingly, is more abstract, its rhetoric more forceful. But its meaning remains elusive—as I assume is the composer’s intent. And that’s a positive.

This is music that projects genuine mystery, but it’s a mystery that comes out of the familiar. While Postmodernist, it doesn’t engage the more “classic” Postmodern practice of quotation and pastiche. Everything is a very personal creation of this composer.

I note that Sørenson won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award a few years back (for L’Isola), and now I can see why. Highly recommended.

-- Fanfare

Although Sørenson is often regarded as an introspective writer there is much here that is bold and exciting. This is a welcome release of world premiere recordings of the title track (L’Isola della Citta) and his Second Symphony.

-- Lark Reviews

Discover the bold and innovative chamber music of Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen (b. 1976) in this retrospective release featuring the Oslo Sinfonietta under the direction of Christian Eggen and Rei Munakata. Spanning 2001-2007, the album presents Praesens, Besides, Amid�and Chambered Music - works that redefine musical space, texture, and gesture with striking precision and playful intensity. Through his masterful exploration of instrumental theatre and sonic materiality, we hear Steen-Andersen's distinctive voice take shape.

Niels Rosing-Schow (b. 1954) crafts chamber music of sensual, organic allure, rich with contrast and sonic elegance. This album unveils four works - from the vibrant 'Dance and Signs in the Air' to the soulful 'Respiro ergo sum' - crowned by his exquisite take on Debussy's 'Six epigraphes antiques'. Through kinetic archetypes and seamless musical arcs, Rosing-Schow shapes an immediate, evocative voice, timeless yet fresh, speaking vividly on music's own terms.

Olesen: Piano Works

This album presents Rune Glerup's (b. 1981) String Quartet No. 2, crafted for and dedicated to Quatuor Diotima, alongside his Clarinet Quintet featuring Jonas Frolund. Glerup's quartet, steeped in Beckettian echoes, captures the absurd beauty of life's endless loops, from park strolls to barroom reveries. The Clarinet Quintet, a labyrinth of musical nods - from Boulez to Brahms - fuses past and present in a tribute to the voices that shaped Glerup's own, creating a sound world both familiar and intriguingly new.

Erik Hojsgaard's (b. 1954) music has always possessed a dreamlike quality, where everything moves in the space between reality and our memory of it. Observers have aptly compared his tonal language to the orchestral artistry of Alban Berg. This album brings together three of Hojsgaard's key chamber works: in 'Essays', he captures the magical atmosphere of Venice, while 'Udstillingsbillede' transforms L.A. Ring's iconic painting into a musical reflection. The album concludes with 'Please accept a Sunset', where fragments of literary worlds intertwine within a soundscape imbued with a dreamlike resonance.

Bára Gísladóttir (b. 1989) considers sounds, instruments, and ensembles as living organisms. In COR, Hringla, and VAPE, the Icelandic composer and double bassist engages with the largest musical organism of all: the symphony orchestra. Inspired by death metal or techno as much as by Scelsi or Penderecki, the foreboding atmosphere of her music is cut through with irony, puns, and black humor. After all, organisms themselves – especially human bodies – contain the potential for both comic excess and self-annihilation. In these three works, we follow Gísladóttir’s fascination with language and coincidence; we hear an uncompromising interrogation of the body’s excesses and ailments; and, most of all, we see life, vaporous and between states, neither dark nor light.

With Adaptations, The Firebirds - Banke, Filipsen & Pasborg, a critically acclaimed Danish trio, carve out a musical realm where genres intertwine and strict fidelity takes on a fluid form. Departing from convention, the trio ignites a sequence of improvisations that evolve into fresh string quartets, composed by a variety of contemporary classical composers and performed by the Nordic String Quartet, ultimately morphing into new arrangements, creating an ever-changing musical landscape.

Anders Koppel’s borderless view of music has taken in everything from psychedelic rock to world music and avant-garde concert pieces. But his gregarious musical aesthetic has found a special home in the world of the instrumental concerto, a genre whose exchange of energies continues to inspire him. Three of Koppel's most charming concertos are heard here in new recordings from the musicians who inspired them and the Danish Sinfonietta, that commissioned and first performed them.

On this newest endeavour, the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Joachim Gustafsson, turns its attention towards Danish composer August Enna (1859–1939) with renderings of two of his charming orchestral works. Traces of several elements from Enna’s musical life converge in the Violin Concerto: his background as a violinist and his deep connection to opera meet the tradition of Nordic national romanticism. While Symphony No. 2 may be considered conservative for its era, it is abundantly rich in its continuous melodic flow, creating an immediately impactful experience.

Bára Gísladóttir wrote VÍDDIR to mark the end of her studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. The title of the piece translates as ’dimensions’, and from its first sounds of five bass flautists screaming, ‘as strong as possible’, into their instruments, it is clear that VÍDDIR is not a light-hearted leap into a new life. It is a black night of a piece. An abyss, into which Gísladóttir has dived and reached deeply. An unbroken hour in length, it returns again and again to its own dark light.