Jón LEIFS
(1899-1968)/Hjálmar H RAGNARSSON
Tears of Stone - music from the film
LEIFS: Iceland Cantata;
Elegy; Galdra Loftur Overture; Funeral March
LEIFS: (folk): Icelandic Dance;
Funeral March; Andante; Preludio Organo
RAGNARSSON: Lif's Theme I and II;
Variations I, II and III; Lovers' Duet; After the Concert;
In the ballroom; Annie Listens to the Radio
ICELAND MUSIC INFORMATION CENTRE ITM 6-05
[58.05]
This is a film score disc. The film Tears of Stone is a dramatisation
of the life of Iceland's composer laureate, Jón Leifs. The Tonabio
film was completed and released in 1995 with financial support from the Icelandic
Film Corporation and IDE-Film Felixson. In the UK, surprisingly, it has not,
to the best of my knowledge, turned up on Channel 4 or BBC 2; costs of
subtitling, I wonder. I do hope that the Iceland Music Centre have a video
of the film. I would certainly like to review it.
There are 25 tracks of which eleven are original compositions by Leifs and
five are of his works based on Icelandic folk song. Nine tracks are by
Ragnarsson. The Leifs material (or at least the most substantial excerpts)
are from the Chandos Leifs anthology.
Ragnarsson contributes a piano tango (4) as well as the distant and deliberately
distorted song Meine kleine Freundin (a little like Weill's Surabaya
Johnny) heard like some muffled memory of a memory of a radio broadcast.
Lif's Theme, Funeral March, Andante and Preludio
are Ragnarsson out of Leifs. They take in a slow dance for piano, a sombre
invocation à la Gabrieli, a furiously dissonant organ-dominated piece
and a simple dance recalling similar essays by Skalkottas (Greek) and by
Holmboe (Rumanian). A charming musette movement for solo piano is
another Ragnarsson/Leifs piece based on Icelandic folk song.
Of the pure Leifs tracks I single out the Iceland Cantata for its
slow tolling choral threat and the white singing tone of the full choir.
There is also a gentle Requiem. The Lullaby hints at the
energy-sapped exhaustion of Luonnotar. The extract from Baldr
(a much bigger work which you can hear on the CP2 label) is notable for its
rolling drums, bardic grimacing and its brassy menace predictive of John
Williams' Jaws music. The piano solo valse lente is like a
fractured Chopin Ballade. Indeed a similarly charming naivety motivates
Reverie and Icelandic Dance. The Galdra Loftur overture,
a gruff troll's hymn perhaps, has a warrior tread, squally strings and stuttering
rhythmic figures. The most impressive track is the Elegy (21) - a
hymn for strings: restrained like some skewed Valse Triste suggesting
stars glimmering through strands of fog. This ascends to a theme for high
strings. Again Roy Harris and gently evolutionary images of warm mid-west
nights will occur to those who know their repertoire. This is the music of
a Nordic Vaughan Williams - Tallis extrapolated through the aurora
borealis.
This disc must work well as a memento of the film (if you saw it in the first
place!) and as a Leifs sampler. The Ragnarsson tracks are pleasant but do
not have the impact of the Leifs works. Fortunately the Leifs assortment
includes some complete works which will echo in the memory.
Rob Barnett
ORDERING DETAILS
Helga Sif Gudmundsdóttir
Iceland Music Information Centre
http://www.mic.is/english/index.htm
Sidumula 34
108 Reykjavik
ICELAND
phone +354 568 3122
fax +354 568 3124
itm@mic.is
