from the Sono Luminus Web page for the recording being discussed
According to my records, I have been following Sono Luminus releases of Icelandic performances since August of 2015, when Clockworking, the debut album of Nordic Affect, first appeared. First impressions found this music intriguing; but, as subsequent releases emerged, I gradually became concerned that I was getting “more of the same.” However, yesterday brought me my first opportunity to listen to music by Icelandic composers performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. The accompanying background material described Occurrence as “the third and final installment in a trilogy of albums from Sono Luminus and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
The physical release is a bit curious, since it consists of two discs. The first is the CD of the five compositions on the album, each by a different composer. This is coupled with (from the advance announcement) “Pure Audio Blu-ray with 9.1 Auro-3D, Dolby Atmos 7.1.4, and 5.1 DTS-MA versions, as well as the mShuttle application containing FLAC and MP3 audio files” (whew!). The album is scheduled for release tomorrow; but the best site for pre-ordering is the product page on the Sono Luminus Web site. Amazon has created a Web page for MP3 downloads; but, as of this writing, only one track is available. However, there is a hyperlink for pre-ordering the entire album. I am happy to report that the full download includes the accompany booklet. However, it appears that Amazon will not commit to delivering the physical version.
As was the case with Clockworking, Occurrence is an album with distinctive diversity across the five selections on the program. Mind you, there are eccentricities that some might dismiss as overly mannered. At the very beginning of the first track, a violin concerto by Daníel Bjarnason, the attentive listener almost immediately recognizes that the composer expects the soloist (Pekka Kuusisto, for whom the piece was written, on this album) to whistle, sometimes simultaneously with bowing his instrument. As one might suspect, this leads to some decidedly unconventional sonorities; but Bjarnason’s sense of overall architecture is such that these “extended sonorities” never descend into the realm of gratuitous gestures. It is probably worth noting that he also conducts the Iceland Symphony Orchestra for all of the selections on this album. (As a result, there probably were no serious disagreements between composer and conductor!)
The other concertante selection is “Flutter,” composed by Þuríður Jónsdóttir for solo flute (Mario Caroli) and orchestra with sampled sounds of grasshoppers and crickets. This piece was commissioned to mark the centenary of Olivier Messiaen, but it involves extended techniques that occupy territory beyond the range of sonorities that Messiaen could evoke. As one might guess, flutter tonguing is involved; but that technique assumes is rightful place alongside the many other devices maintained by Jónsdóttir in her toolbox.
Both of these concertante selections are roughly twenty minutes in duration. In both cases that is an interval long enough to establish a rich palette of sonorities without allowing any of them to overstay their welcome. The other three pieces on the album, “Lendh” by Veronique Vaka, “In Seventh Heaven” by Haukur Tómasson, and “Adagio” by Magnús Blöndal Jóhannsson, are closer to the ten-minute duration. These may be approached more at the level of études, each exploring the expressiveness of its own limited palette of sonorities. From a personal point of view, I found myself most struck by “Adagio,” almost as if the composer was seeking an approach that would follow in the footsteps of the Adagio rhetoric of Gustav Mahler. It is not so much that Jóhannsson has explicitly evoked Mahler’s spirit as it is that he found a new approach to reflect on Mahler’s rhetorical techniques, bringing just as much intensity to a much shorter overall duration.
No comments:
Post a Comment