Nørgård: Symphony 6: At the End of the Day / Terrains Vague
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Edition: Music CDCD Release Date: 2002-07-23
Music Label: Chandos
Music reviews of Nørgård: Symphony 6: At the End of the Day / Terrains Vague
Music Review: Norgard's Nordic Sound
Rating: 5 Stars
This is a positive review but it begins with one or two small cavils. Per Nørgård (born 1932) studied with Vagn Holmboe and he stands in the Danish symphonic tradition that passes from Carl Nielsen through Holmboe to composers of the living generation. Nørgård's first symphony, his "Sinfonia Austera" (1955), shows the definite imprint of his teacher and might even be mistaken for an unknown Holmboe score. Nørgård's later symphonies (Nos. 2-5) veered from tradition. The marks of form and tonality that made "Sinfonia Austera" so impressive gave way to what could and sometimes did sound like directionless orchestral improvisation. Nørgård abandoned Holmboe's technique of "metamorphosis" in favor of his own "infinity series." He cited Indian music as an influence and talked in Jungian language about "archetypes." There is something disconcertingly "new age" in much of Nørgård's work in the 1970s and 80s and early 90s. He often composed on a large scale, like his elder Swedish counterpart Allan Pettersson, but without the anguish or the drama - or the propulsive ostinatos - that make the latter's neurotic outpourings endurable. Nørgård's sounds were often lovely; the level of actual dissonance was never high (much less so than in Pettersson). But the works labeled "symphony" corresponded to something other than what is usually brought to mind when employing the term. Here's the good news: Nørgård's Symphony No. 6 (1998), subtitled "Når alt kommer till alt," shows the composer resurrecting, as it were, more than a bit of the formality that gave "Sinfonia Austera" its memorable outline. The subtitle might be translated as "When all's said and done" although the annotator casts it in English as "At the end of the day." In either case, the saw has a valedictory connotation and suggests a stoical summing-up. Symphony No. 6 is in three movements (on the pattern of "Sinfonia Austera" and of many of the Holmboe symphonies), with the last two played without pause. Clocking in at over seventeen minutes, the initial Moderato is as long as the other two movements combined. As in "Sinfonia Austera," Nørgård serves up a real conflict symphony; like many a characteristic Nordic symphony, "Når alt kommer till alt" seems to represent a cosmic war between darkness and light. The impression is especially strong in the Moderato. By incorporating in the score an array of bass register instruments, the composer heightens the contrast between high and low, or "daylight" and "nighttime" sounds. In fact, the movement opens with a kind of descent from the starry heights, with the dark depth rising gradually to meet and mix with the radiance. The effect is similar to the one achieved by the Finn Kalevi Aho in the opening movement of his Tenth Symphony, which makes a good reference point, should anyone know it. The turbulence of the first movement of Holmboe's "Sinfonia Borealis" (his No. 8) also comes to mind. The middle movement, marked Lentissimo, offers nine minutes of cool, shadowy repose before the dualistic conflict is taken up again in the concluding Allegro Energico. The companion to the symphony on this disc is another of Nørgård's recent works, "Terrains Vagues" (2000; revised 2001). The title comes from a suite of poems by the Danish poet Klaus Rifbjerg. The three movements, lasting in total about a half an hour, are: "Terrains," "Vagues," and "Terrains Vagues." The punning is clever, and I suppose it is represented in the music by motivic cross-reference from movement to movement. Not quite as symphonic as Symphony No. 6, "Terrains Vagues" is nevertheless more formally obvious than the works typical of Nørgård's middle period, from Symphony No. 2 to Symphony No. 5. As in "Når alt kommer till alt" one has a sense of conflict and motion, especially in the machine rhetoric of the first section. These particular "Terrains" seem to be under assault by bulldozers and other engines of excavation. If the "Vagues" of the second section brought to mind Debussy, the association would not be too far off from the mark. The human and machine presence has withdrawn to the distance. Nørgård recreates Impressionism with a modern (I guess people would nowadays call it a postmodern) vocabulary. In the third and final section, "Terrains Vagues," Nørgård achieves a more jocular tone, as though the human and the natural had been felicitously reconciled. Thomas Dausgaard leads Danish National Symphony Orchestra in performances that bring out the formal features of both works and so help listeners to understand their moderately difficult musical syntax. Chandos has recorded the complete cycle of Nørgård's symphonies, a work of real devotion. All of them are currently available according to the booklet. The commitment of Maestro Dausgaard, of Leif Segerstam (who splits the series with him), and of the entrepreneurs at Chandos should more than counterbalance, for non-prejudiced readers, my own paltry reservations about the whole cycle of Nørgård's symphonies, as expressed above. The Chandos engineers, who do their usual fine job of managing the acoustics, everywhere make the complicated polyphony transparent. Strongly recommended.
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