Rolf Martinsson - Into Eternity (Lisa Larsson; Paul Mägi)

Information

Composer: Rolf Martinsson

• (01) Opening Sounds, Op. 94
• (02) Ich denke Dein …, Op. 100
• (07) Tour de force, Op. 95
• (08) Into Eternity, Op. 103

Lisa Larsson, soprano (2-6, 8)
Malmö Symphony Orchestra
Paul Mägi, conductor

Date: 2019
Label: BIS Records
https://bis.se/performers/larsson-lisa/rolf-martinsson-into-eternity

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Review

Unless one happens to be dealing with Wolfgang Rihm, Kaija Saariaho or Steve Reich, it’s difficult to suppress the surge of scepticism that swiftly accompanies an opening statement on a CD booklet proclaiming the composer in question to be an ‘internationally regarded’ leading figure. Rolf Martinsson – who he? My hastily conducted research yielded very little about him in Grove Music Online (or Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the German-language equivalent). To be fair, the full statement in the booklet notes refers to Martinsson (b1956) as ‘one of Sweden’s leading composers’. However, one struggles to find anything among the four works presented here that will elevate Martinsson’s music beyond national or regional significance.

There is no doubting Martinsson’s gift as an orchestrator. His ability to control, combine and blend instrumental colours imaginatively and creatively is evident throughout. The fanfare-like Opening Sounds, recalling the composer’s earlier concert overture Open Mind, springs into action with bold-as-brass trumpets, busy, scurrying strings and more harp glissandos than you’ll hear in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie intro. Tour de force, with its thunderous, percussion-heavy opening, is full of raw power and dramatic presence. Martinsson also has a gift for text-setting, as heard in the intensely expressive Into Eternity, which features Lisa Larsson’s impressively haunting soprano voice. And the orchestral song-cycle Ich denke Dein … is bound together through the subtle use of thematic interplay and development. Yet, despite flashes of originality, Martinsson’s music remains for the most part caught in the musical gestures and clichés not so much of the last fin de siècle but of the one that came before it.

One of Martinsson’s teachers, Brian Ferneyhough, would surely qualify as an ‘internationally leading’ figure, yet from the evidence contained on this recording any trace of the English composer’s influence vanished a long time ago. Like many composers of his generation, Martinsson’s rite of passage involved first embracing then expunging the spectre of modernism and atonality; but if the net result is a kind of watered-down neo-Romanticism consisting of three parts John Williams outtakes from Attack of the Clones, to which has been added one part Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, then give me Ferneyhough any day.

-- Pwyll ap Siôn, Gramophone

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Rolf Martinsson (born 1 May 1956 in Glimåkra, Skåne, Sweden) is a Swedish composer. Martinsson studied composition at Malmö Academy of Music, Lund University 1981-85 under Brian Ferneyhough, Sven-David Sandström, Hans Eklund, Sven-Eric Johanson, Jan W. Morthenson and Sven-Erik Bäck. Since 1987 he has taught composition and arranging at the same academy. Since 2002 he has been artistic director (for new music) of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra. Martinsson has written pieces in many different genres such as orchestral music, solo concertos, choral music, chamber music and music for radio theatre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Martinsson
https://www.rolfmartinsson.com/

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Lisa Larsson (born 14 February 1967) is a Swedish classical soprano singer. Larsson studied in Basel and since 1993 appeared in the Internationales Opernstudio of the Zurich Opera House. She has performed at La Scala Milan, Opera de Lausanne, Komische Oper Berlin and with the Basel Opera Company, as well as many European festivals such as the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Salzburg Easter Festival and The BBC Proms. As a concert singer, Larsson has appeared with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Larsson
https://www.lisalarsson.info/en_biografie.php

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Paul Mägi (born 13 October 1953) is an Estonian conductor and jazz violinist. Mägi has had a long and successful career as conductor and artistic leader of several prominent ensembles in the Baltic states, including the Latvian National SO, the Estonian Radio Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian National Opera. He has given concerts all over Europe and the USA, appearing with the Detroit SO, the Moscow Philharmonic, the Ecuador National SO and many major orchestras in Sweden. Mägi is a professor at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and a guest professor at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_M%C3%A4gi
https://bis.se/conductors/magi-paul/

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