Classical Music

The works that make up this adventurous release are all, to quote Shakespeare, "such stuff as dreams are made on". In various ways these recordings refer to night and dreams, to the distant past or to an uncertain future. With composers from Denmark, Norway, Finland, Germany and Greece, and texts ranging from fragments of ancient Assyrian and Sumerian and 8th-century Wessobrunner Prayer to many other places, the concept of "here and now" become blurred and dreamlike.

In 1999-2000, Niels-Henning �rsted Pedersen was given the chance to make a studio recording on the occasion of Duke Ellington's 100th birthday. For this duo session, NH�P chose Mulgrew Miller, whom he had heard, but never played with. Both were at the height of their careers, giants in their own right, and with totally different backgrounds. NH�P was born into the Danish folk high-school milieu that promoted freedom of thought and had a prolific song tradition. Growing up as the child of plantation workers in Greenwood, Mississippi, Mulgrew had his roots in gospel music and the racially divided USA of the 1960s. A Duke Ellington connoisseur, he had played with the Ellington Orchestra under direction of Mercer Ellington. Recorded live, all the tracks on this never before released concert remain in the same order as the two masters chose that evening at the North Sea Jazz Festival. They are at the peak of their abilities, combining new version of the Ellington songs they had previously recorded together with jazz standards. Niels-Henning and Mulgrew have sadly passed away, but are remembered as intelligent and insightful musicians on and off stage, but also as unconditionally generous mentors and influences for generations of musicians after themselves.

Luciano Berio’s Coro has been described as the work that ‘exemplifies all the qualities that made him one of the leading composers of our time’. The work’s full title is ‘Coro for voices and instruments’, and the 40 voices and 44 instrumentalists do indeed make up a single choir – instrumentalists and singers sit together, with each singer paired with a particular player, and used both as soloists and combined in mass effects. Composed in 1976, Coro is also a strikingly ‘global’ work: Berio’s use of texts (mainly translations of folk poetry) attributed to peoples – ‘Peruvian’, ‘Croatian’, ‘Sioux’ – turns the work into a chorus of cultures. The texts are laid out in 31 separate sections of varying length, but the overall effect is cumulative, not episodic. The only named author is the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who became a powerful posthumous voice following his death in 1973 in the wake of General Pinochet’s military coup. Along with other text fragments, his words ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’ keep returning during the course of the work, and the sense emerges of human individuals needing to be alerted to social and political developments demanding a collective response. Under its artistic director Grete Pedersen the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir has made acclaimed recordings of music ranging from Norwegian folk songs and Hildegard of Bingen to Bach, Brahms and Xenakis. Joined by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra it now takes on one of the major choral works of the past 50 years. The album closes with Berio’s smaller scale Cries of London, performed by members of the choir.

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REVIEW:

Luciano Berio is quite rightly viewed as one of the most interesting and adventurous composers of his time. More so than many of his works from the 1960s, Coro struck me as being closer in style and spirit to some of the work of György Ligeti, particularly Ligeti at his best. It is the massed choral sound — and the astonishingly brash, almost metallic sound of the instrumental ensemble — that strikes one the most and stays in the mind. Needless to say, this is exactly the sort of work for which Bis’s SACD sonics are ideal.

– Art Music Lounge (Lynn René Bayley)

Conceived as homage from the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir to the man who founded it in 1950 and remained its leader for 40 years, Knut Nystedt who passed away in December 2014, at the age of 99. Alongside the two Bach motets here featuring the choir along with Ensemble Allegria and Maria Angelika Carlsen on violin solo, among Nystedt’s repertoire with the choir, the collection also prominently features four works of Nystedt’s, including O Crux (1977) which Nystedt regarded as one of his main works. The choir provides an ineffable epitaph to Nystedt’s legacy with this release, together with Grete Pedersen, Nystedt's successor as artistic leader of the choir. Recorded in Super Audio.