Per Nørgård - Whirl's World (Ensemble MidtVest)

Information

Composer: Per Nørgård

• (01) Spell, Trio No. 2
• (02) Suite from 'Babette's Feast'
• (10) Trio breve, Three Fragments (After a Dream)
• (13) Whirl’s World

Ensemble MidtVest
Ana Feitosa, violin
Sanna Ripatti, viola
Jonathan Slaatto, violoncello
Charlotte Norholt, flute
Peter Kirstein, oboe
Tommaso Lonquich, clarinet
Neil Page French, horn
Yavor Petkov, bassoon
Martin Qvist Hansen, piano

Date: 2019
Label: Dacapo Records
https://www.dacapo-records.dk/en/recordings/norgard-whirls-world

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Review

It’s a mistake to consider Per Nørgård a dogmatic composer and this release proves it in style, placing some of his strictest system-based musical structures alongside wide-eyed film music as if to prove that both are built of the same clarity, sincerity and joie de vivre.

Spell (1973) for clarinet, cello and piano followed Nørgård’s Symphony No 2 and, like that piece, uses the Infinity Series (the composer’s personal integer sequence) to set up a gorgeous self-perpetuating structure that is flicked like a spinning top on to its path for the composer to nudge now and then when he needs to. And this composer knows exactly when he needs to: the modulation at 8'26", the clarinet glissando that follows and the symmetrical wind-down that brings the music to its pleasingly shy ending.

There is symmetry, too, in Whirl’s World (1970), a work related to Nørgård’s seminal Voyage into the Golden Screen (1968), which advances certain foundations laid by the composer’s Nordic forbears (Sibelius included) in establishing a tight pattern from which listeners can discern their own musical forms. It works because Nørgård gathers his material with a care and clarity, which itself sorts out momentum. The aforementioned symmetry helps; the piece is almost a clear palindrome. The mini geometric mosaics that form Trio breve (2012) feel like dispersed shrapnel from these bigger pieces.

In between, we hear the full breadth of the music Nørgård wrote for Gabriel Axel’s 1987 film realisation of Karen Blixen’s short story Babette’s Feast (only a tenth of it made it into the picture, which won Denmark its first Academy Award). Still Nørgård winds his structures tightly, which sets up the claustrophobia of the village setting nicely in ‘Babette by Herself’ and gets right to the heart of the volume title, Anecdotes of Destiny, in the vibrato-less ditties of ‘Pastoral’ and ‘Homecoming’ (the whole book is really about retaining worldliness and humility in the presence of grandeur and greatness).

Those two, in particular, are gorgeously played, with a lightness of bow contact that stands in total contrast to the deep engagement we heard in the cello solo of Spell, to cite just one instance of stylistic flexibility in performances that are sublime and knowing. I can think of few composers of the last half a century whose music is so disciplined yet so heartfelt, so original yet so rooted. These are precious values and the unassuming, plain-speaking nature of the music here only proves it.

-- Andrew Mellor, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2019/Nov/Norgard_world_8226136.htm
https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2019/07/05/ensemble-midtvest-whirls-through-the-world-of-norgard/

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Per Nørgård (born 13 July 1932 in Gentofte, Denmark) is a Danish composer. He studied with Vagn Holmboe at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and subsequently with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Nørgård has composed works in all major genres: six operas, two ballets, eight symphonies and other pieces for orchestra, several concertos, choral and vocal works, a very large number of chamber works and several solo instrumental works. Nørgård's music often features the use of the infinity series, a method takes its name from the endlessly self-similar nature of the resulting musical material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_N%C3%B8rg%C3%A5rd

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Founded in 2002, Ensemble MidtVest consists of a string quartet, a wind quintet and a pianist. Performing more than 100 concerts a year both in Denmark and abroad, the ensemble has been invited to such venues as the Carnegie Hall in New York and Kings’ Place in London, as well as renowned international festivals. The ensemble has collaborated with renowned musicians, and has recorded more than twenty CDs, winning multiple awards. Ensemble MidtVest resides at HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, an extraordinary venue designed by the American architect Steven Holl.
http://www.emv.dk/

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