New recording from Dacapo featuring the acoustic works of Jørgen Plaetner
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Jørgen Plaetner is best known as one of the pioneers of electronic music in Scandinavia. This new recording from Danish label Dacapo (8226520) features Plaetner’s acoustic works and includes Episoder og Kollisoner, Op. 82 (1996) for clarinet, cello and piano; Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 93 (2000-2001); Three Songs to Texts by Stig Dagerman (1988); and Four Danish Songs. 
Born in Copenhagen in 1930, Plaetner played piano as a child and entered the Royal Danish Academy of music at the age of 19, where he studied with Vagn Holmboe, Niels Viggo Bentzon, and Bjørn Hjelmborg. Early on, he became aware of the experimentation going on abroad in the field of electronic music, and at 20 he became one of the first Danes to participate in courses for contemporary music at Darmstadt. He attended the first performances of Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte, which inspired him to set up his own electronic music studio. In addition, Plaetner was a music teacher and taught at the State School for the Blind for almost a decade before taking a position in the town of Holstebro as the country’s first “town composer.” While serving in Holstebro, he set up a council music school for children and wrote music for local ensembles. Unfortunately, a rift with the city council in 1977 precipitated his move to Sweden, where he lived for the rest of his life.
When Plaetner died in 2002, his computer music was almost entirely forgotten in Denmark until Dacapo released a CD with a selection of his electronic works from the 1960s and 1970s (8226511), giving these works a new lease on life. That said, his electronic works have largely overshadowed his acoustic music, which includes music for chamber ensembles, vocal and theater music, and eight piano sonatas.
Representing one of the larger chamber works from Plaetner’s later period is the trio Episodes and Collisions, which was written in 1996 for the LINensemble. Partly influenced by Eastern European folk music (filtered through Bartók and Holmboe), the piece consists of various episodes that collide, in the manner of a rhapsody.
Plaetner’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano was one of his last works, and this performance marks its world premiere. In this three-movement work, the clarinet is torn between three different moods: frantic, touching, and wounded.
Plaetner’s settings of Swedish texts by Stig Dagerman show his interest in politics. Dagerman, from 1943 until his suicide in 1954, noted his daily observations in the form of “diary leaves,” which were printed in a left-wing Swedish newspaper. Plaetner came across the texts when they appeared in book form in 1983. They became “shrewd, ironic aphorisms on the meaninglessness of war.” The Four Danish Songs feature settings of poems by poets Halfdan Rasmussen, one of Denmark’s best-loved poets, symbolist poet Sophus Claussen, Arne Herløv Petersen and Pia Tafdrup.
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