Danish label Dacapo never fails to impress me with its superb recordings. Last month, they released a stunning performance of choral works by Hanne Ørvad, a composer who began her career as a professional singer (Dacapo 8226534).
This month (on October 28, to be precise) they are releasing Kronos Plays Holmgreen (Dacapo 6220548), featuring works by renowned Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (b 1932) performed by the Kronos Quartet, British baritone Paul Hillier, and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR, led by Thomas Dausgaard. The recording is the culmination of 20 years of collaboration between Holmgreen and the Kronos Quartet, and includes his Concerto Grosso for string quartet and orchestra (1990; rev. 1995); Moving Still, written for Hans Christian Andersen’s bicentenary in 2005 and featuring Paul Hillier; and Last Ground, his Ninth String Quartet, written in 2006 and dedicated to the Kronos Quartet.
Born in 1932, Holmgreen was the son of a sculptor. His early works showed the influence of Stravinsky, Bartók and Hindemith, but around 1960 he began experimenting with serialism. By the end of the 1960s, Holmgreen was among the Danish composers who rejected the serialist techniques in favor of a “new simplicity.” From then on, his music was characterized by repetitions, not in the minimalist sense, but rather as absurdist provocation. Some of the many influences in his works are Baroque music, Pygmy music, jazz, plainchant, the sounds of everyday life, and sheer noise— and, to a very great extent, the master of the absurd, author Samuel Beckett. Among his many orchestral works are Symfoni - Antifoni, for which he won a Nordic Council Music Prize (1977); Concerto Grosso for string quartet and orchestra; Triptykon (1985) for orchestra and percussion; and a new Cello Concerto. He also has written many chamber works, choral works, and solo pieces.
The Kronos Quartet premiered Concerto Grosso in 1990. In 1995 came the first revised version (recorded on Dacapo 8224060); the version on this CD was made in 2006. One of Holmgreen’s largest works, Concerto Grosso draws from the Baroque musical form of the same name in which various instruments emerge from the ensemble to play with or against the orchestra. The work frequently alludes to Baroque music—sometimes subtly, other times more blatantly. Holmgreen characterizes the music as “Vivaldi on safari” and explains that “I’m looking for a filtering of the familiar—the familiar seen through a prism.”
Moving Still – H.C. Andersen 200 consists of two movements, one American, one Danish. The first, Moving, is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s prophetic text In a Thousand Years, a Jules Verne-like fantasy predicting that Americans will one day be able to fly over the Atlantic and “see Europe in a week.” Andersen writes:
In a thousand years people will fly on the wings of steam through the air, over the ocean! The young inhabitants of America will become visitors of old Europe. They will come over to see the monuments and the great cities, which will then be in ruins, just as we in our time make pilgrimages to the tottering splendors of Southern Asia.
The second movement, Still, is a portrait of the “Old World”. Here Holmgreen uses Andersen’s patriotic poem “Danmark er jeg født” (In Denmark I Was Born) with ironic sophistication; he composed it for U.K. native Paul Hillier, now a resident of Denmark. “He speaks Danish rather well,” observes Holmgreen, “but his English accent can’t be denied and this sheds a wry light on the perception of Danishness as something you can only acquire when you’re a 100% native Dane.”
Holmgreen’s Ninth String Quartet, Last Ground, was written in 2006 and is dedicated to the Kronos Quartet. About this music—which includes manipulated recordings of sea sounds—the composer writes: “In Last Ground it is the violent aspect of the sea I was thinking about. I think it is quite wonderful. In the face of the roaring, raging sea the quartet is a small little thing. It’s very fainthearted and gradually it gets slower and weaker. What starts as a pale, small little thing gets even paler!”
The title Last Ground, Holmgreen explains, may be taken literally. “After all I’m an old codger and I don’t know how many more grounds I’ll manage to make,” he says. “This is maybe the last one. A farewell to the string quartet and to more than that. And so you think about what sort of life you’ve lived. Well, it’s a small little life, a puff of breath in the reeds, surrounded by this great roar! A whispering string quartet – and then washed away by the storm flood. The violence can have a liberating effect. As a storm can. As a roaring sea can. And we shrink away. From little to less.”
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