Fredrik HAGSTEDT (b. 1975)
Sinfonia per due violini (2011) [44:36]
Depurazione (2002) [28:36]
Duo Gelland (Cecilia and Martin Gelland, violins)
rec. July 2011, Church of Laxsjö, Jämtland, Sweden
NOSAG CD 192 [73:19]
Swedish composer Fredrik Hagstedt, born in 1975
has fashioned two large-scale works for violin duo in this release,
one in fact distinctly larger than the other. The earlier piece was
the more compact Depurazione, composed in 2002. It calls upon
both musicians’ feeling for scale, control and sense of projection
whereas the Sinfonia, written nearly a decade later, takes these
for granted and adds considerable technical and physical demands, not
the least of which is the ability to keep close ensemble for fully forty-four
and a half minutes.
This larger work is cast in four movements with the tauter third approximating
to a scherzo. Though there are precedents in such things as Allan Pettersson’s
sonatas for two violins, one feels that Hagstedt is treading his own
distinct path in his two pieces. The Sinfonia’s ethos is not abrasive
nor is it confrontational. In fact it’s rooted very much more
in traditional seeming material, including some folkloric elements that
recur from time to time, but are clearly not included as pastiche or
for reasons of local colour. Rather, they are part of an engaging vocabulary
that relies on a series of juxtapositions of mood and material but not
on outsize gestures. Hagstedt ensures that dappled pizzicati - at the
start of the second movement in particular - add timbral variety. The
somewhat filmic writing in the finale, coupled with subsequently sonorous
unison writing, ensures that the Sinfonia evokes plenty of nuance. Its
somewhat distended form and the profusion of incidents does mean that
a close ear needs to be paid at all times to the music’s development.
Depurazione is, in that sense, a more cohesive and evolved piece
of writing that seems to fall into three sections, the second of which
is intensely quiet and watchful. It too is full of sonic incident and
these are also recurring, something the composer feeds on in both works
as indeed he does when it comes to matters of variation.
No praise can be too high for the intrepid Duo Gelland, excellently
recorded in a church setting. In the booklet, full of abstract art and
poems, one can engage with the composer’s view of things musical
and human. In a kind-of biography in the booklet he calls himself ‘Human.
Composer. Human. Maybe poet. Poetically indeterminable poet.’
There’s quite a bit of this kind of thing, as well as the admission
that composers compose and shit. So now we know.
Jonathan Woolf
