There must have been a mob of classical listeners who sensed a door opening when Chandos began releasing recordings of Danish composer Per Norgard's music in the late 1990s. Enthusiastic reviews award nominations and prizes stacked up. When the Leif Segerstan-directed account of the Third Symphony appeared, that clinched it — the work was clearly a masterpiece of the first rank by a composer, revered in his native Denmark, who had previously somewhat unknown to many (I knew him as the composer of the musical soundtrack for the film Babette's Feast).
BABETTE’S FEAST: Libra; Rêves En Plein Lumière; Kredslob. Stefan Östersjö (guitar, Libra), Adam Riis (tenor, Libra), Vocal soloists (Rêves), Danish National Vocal Ensemble, conducted by Fredrik Malmsberg. DaCapo CD or download.
What surprised many was that the symphony, like other works Norgard composed in the late 1960-70s, was based on the kind of strict mathematical system that had been scaring listeners away from much post-World War II music for decades. His method was not serialism (he had tried and abandoned that), but a system based on what he called the "infinityseries", itself based on the Mandelbrot set that underlies fractals, generating integer sequences from single intervals and expanding outward into increasingly remote harmonic territory. This sounds as redolent of science clobbering art as some of the other system-enchained music we have heard during the last century.
But somehow, your ears know what to do with it, and the rich harmonies and chord progressions Norgard creates have communicative power no listener can miss. Eventually the composer felt that even this system was too restrictive and moved on, but his best works from the infinity series period are spellbinding.
One of the lesser-known pieces outside of Denmark is given a near-ideal performance — and recording — on this DaCapo release. Libra — scored for solo guitar and tenor, a cappella choir, chorale choir and vibraphone — uses the infinity series to explore ethereal musical territory with sonorities that may remind some listeners who know the composer's Third Symphony of its second movement. It conflates two sets of texts, one drawn from the biblical Psalms, the other a mystical poem by the Austrian "anthroposophical" philosopher Rudolph Steiner, very much a guru back in the period when this astrology-tinged piece was written.
Norgard's setting of these intertwined texts are preceded by a guitar solo, seductively played by Stefan Östersjö that, with its tonal iridescence, sets an otherworldly mood sustained throughout the work's 10 short movements. The passages from Psalms, which ask for God's mercy and sing his praise, are sung quietly by choral forces, and Steiner's metaphysical poem ("Worlds sustain worlds. Essence senses itself in essence. Being encloses itself in being. And essence brings about essence for the later pouring-forth of actions in the calm enjoyment of worlds.") is initially given to tenor Adam Riis, whose voice combines fervour with a kind of dreaminess that suits the music perfectly.
The sense of spectral otherness that Norgard conjures in Libra reaches an apex in the seventh movement, where tenor, choruses and two vibraphone players create softly fluorescent sonorities that will raise goosebumps on the susceptible. Extremely dense, cluster-like choral writing and flutter-tongued colourations, create the floating effect heard in some of György Ligeti's music — Lux Aeterna, for example, or the Requiem.
Rêves En Pleine Lumière (Dreams In Broad Daylight), in which Norgard sets passages from Paul Éluard's surrealistic verses, is from Norgard's later period, and expresses the motif of fear and nightmares that fills the poetry through a choral sound, filled with strange vibrato-less soprano swoops and group chanting, different from what he uses in Libra. Whistling and finger-cymbal ringing by the choristers embellish it. The dead-on accuracy of attack that the soprano soloists dispatch up in the vocal ionosphere add to the music's unique effect.
Mysticism, this time in the poetry of the Danish poet Ole Sarvig, inspires the musical style of Kredslob (Cycle), completed in 1977. Germ And Crystal, a poem the beauty of which comes across even in translation, printed in the booklet provided ("A heaven-germ on winged foot thrust deep in the earth its root and grew into a tree of might like dark streams longing toward light/We meet our own tracks, out thoughts run toward horizons, and we roam around our round planed, on shores of lakes for days, nights."), again finds an eloquent counterpart in the shifting colours and lights of Norgard's choral writing, accented by whistling and other non-vocal sounds.
I listened to this release as a high-resolution download from eclassical.com, played on an Astell & Kern 100 II high resolution single DAC audio player through Shure SE 535-V earphones, and the sound quality was absolutely stunning. In the accompanying booklet, DaCapo producer Preben Iwan explains that "the present recording of Libra was set up in accordance with Per Norgard's wish to create a soundscape that would offer a perfect impression of the roles taken by solo-voice, guitar and chorale choir during the progression of the music, at all times keeping the a cappella choir and vibraphones in their more 'ethereal' roles". His engineers succeed magnificently.
Although neither the player (priced locally at about 30,000 baht at shops like Jet Live Audio) nor the earphones are at the very high end, they are expensive (some Astell & Kern players cost almost three times as much, although comparisons of the different models do not reveal a dramatic difference in sound quality — a bat or lab technician might argue the point). Serious listeners willing to shell out for, say, a 64GB iPhone which costs about the same, might consider investing in one, as the trend does appear to be moving away from physical media like CDs, and some of these latest downloads sound truly astonishing.
