Per Nørgård: Sinfonia austera; Symphony No. 2

List Price: $18.99
Our Price: $11.18
You Save: $7.81 (41%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $8.79 (click here)
Category: Music CD
See more CD details

CD Details

Music reviews of Per Nørgård: Sinfonia austera; Symphony No. 2

Music Review: An Auspicious Beginning
Rating: 5 Stars

Norgard's symphonies are perhaps the best way to introduce yourself to this marvelous composer. He has written at least one every decade of his active career and all of his important stylistic periods are represented in the form except the avant-garde period of the mid 60s. Stylistically, they continue a line of symphonic development that is uniquely Norse, relating to Sibelius and Nielsen by way of Norgard's teach Vagn Holmboe. This is most obvious in the Sinfonia Austera.

Written when Norgard was in his 20s, the Sinfonia is an amazing work for a student composer, perhaps equalled only by Shostakovitch's student work, Symphony No. 1. The Norgard symphony is clearly in the Scandanevian tradition. It is dark and brooding, but with flashes of light against the mists. Cast in three movement, the work starts in the nether regions with a craggy, brooding opening movement, moves into a calm lyrical movement and ends with an explosive allegro. The work is tonal, but just barely. Norgard seems to have married the style and structural innovations of his teacher Holmboe with an almost Bergian melodic and harmonic sense. And yet, the final triads of the piece seem to grow organically from the rest of the work. If this symphony has grown neglected, it is only because later Norgard is so extraordinary that this work can get overshadowed. It's too bad. I believe that if Norgard had never left this style, he would still be a symphonist to be reckoned with.

The Symphony No. 2 is an entirely new kettle of fish. Written in the late 60s and premiered in 1970, this work follows up on Norgard's discoveries related to what he calls the infinity series. This series was first "discovered" by Norgard in the late 50s and had been used as a serial technique in avant-garde works of the 60s, but starting with his orchestral piece, Voyage Into the Golden Screen (reviewed by me on the set that includes the opera Gilgamesh) he begins to use this series in new ways. The infinity series is created by interlocking a series and it's inversion by a specified interval and then using the intervals between these interlocking series as the generative force for further intervals. In theory, the series can continue ad infinitum. The series has many fascinating properties. It can be applied to any scale, chromatic, tonal, modal or acoustic. And if you play every fourth note, you get an exact replica of the series in a different key. There are many of these exact replicas in the series, making it a particularly intriguing example of what chaos theroists would now call "fractal" music.

Where Voyage Through a Golden Screen presented the series starkly, Symphony No. 2 begins to explore the inherrant artistic qualities of the procedure. The work begins with a long static passage on a single note. This note gradually expands into a chord based on the harmonic series. Then the infinity series begins, mostly in eighth note movement. Other instruments start to play the series in different layered tempi, based on the internal hierarhies of the series itself. The result of this admittedly dry sounding procedure is sonically rich. The section is dominated by these undulating clouds of sound, which in many ways resemble Gyorg Ligeti's work of the same period, but with a clearer sense of polyphony and a greater tonal and harmonic stability. The effect is broken by increasingly insistent "fanfares" based on the overtone series. A lovely climax is reached and the piece then recedes back into the single tones in which it opened...sort of like the opening and closing of Wagner's Ring cycle.

The performance and sound on this Chandos disc is exemplary. I've had the good fortune to hear the Second Symphony live, and the experience on this disc is every bit as powerful. This is truly a great start to an integral symphonic cycle by one of our most intriguing living composers.

Happy listening!

Description of Per Nørgård: Sinfonia austera; Symphony No. 2

Classical CDs

• Music > Styles