Over the last 10 years, Copenhagen-based graphic designer Denise Burt has been on a unique discovery of contemporary classical music through her work designing covers for hundreds of art music releases. In Seeing New Music she tells, from a personal viewpoint, the stories behind the creation of 24 of her CD designs. She also explains how - starting out as a music novice - she learnt to enquire and engage with the ideas behind the often-complex music in order to create more meaningful designs. She takes us on a visual journey through a diverse range of new music projects and gives us an easily understandable entry-point into a genre of music that is generally considered difficult or elite. 'I've been repeatedly told over the years that the CD is dead... I don't worry any more about them becoming obsolete. What interests me is not the format itself but the challenge of finding a way to represent and communicate conceptual music to new audiences. It's the ultimate design task to try to make someone understand something about a piece of music before they have heard it.' (Denise Burt)

On the eight solo improvisations that make up Dark Radiance, percussionist, performance artist and composer Ying-Hsueh Chen takes listeners on a journey through subtle musical movements that meticulously weave the past into the present in a remarkable manner. Nearly every piece is devoted to a single instrument, and each, for the most part, emerges from a single musical gesture or action, creating sounds from the thunderous to the delicate without overpowering or losing them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Victor Bendix (1851-1926) was a complex figure in Danish music, central but at the same time an outsider. Despite being a highly respected composer, pianist and conductor, he never quite received the recognition he dreamt of. Two of his key works are his Symphonies 1 & 3: they stand as high points in his life, as well as constituting a poignant narrative of his artistic fate. Symphony No. 1, Ascension is his hopeful, ambitious debut, while the melancholic Symphony No. 3 is marked by resignation and fatalism.

Olesen: Piano Works

Echoes showcases Lars Moller's masterful fusion of Scandinavian introspection, robust American jazz, and emotive Indian modalities. Joined by legendary trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and the NDR Bigband, Moller crafts a sonic journey that reflects his artistic evolution and exploration of jazz and Indian music. Contrasting spacious, improvised passages with dense orchestrations, Echoes balances air and fire, creating a timeless soundscape that embraces both spiritual openness and rhythmic intensity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beginning with the intimate, hushed textures of the solo piano cycle '12 Nocturnes' (2000-14), a night music that drifts from sundown to sunrise, and unfolding into the Piano Concerto No. 3, 'La sera estatica' (2021) - an ecstatic evening touched by the fleeting magic of twilight, where new encounters and possibilities quietly awaken, captured live at it's world premiere by the Copenhagen Phil under John Storg�rds - this album immerses the listener in Bent Sorensen's (b. 1958) profound love of the piano and extraordinary poetic imagination.

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.