Comparison music recordings:
Tveitt, Piano Concertos #1 and #5, Gimse,
Engeset, SNO Naxos 8.555077
Samuel Barber, Knoxville: Summer of
1915, Steber, Strickland. Sony MPK 46727
Having enjoyed Tveitt’s
Piano Concerto #5 very much [see
review by TH], I looked forward
to hearing these two concertos. They
were not in any sense copies of each
other, each work being unique and individual,
almost as though by different composers.
The Concerto #1,
variously listed as Op 1 on the Naxos
disk and Op 5 on the BIS disk was
(probably) first written in 1927, but
extensively revised and published in
1931, perhaps with a new opus number.
The work is Neo-Romantic in tone, full
of consonance and melody, especially
the Naxos recording, contains just the
slightest of echoes of other contemporary
composers — Copland, Goldmark, Rachmaninov,
Delius. It moves on to a rather identifiably
Scandinavian peasant dance in the second
movement. Both recordings feature excellent
sound and performances and although
the Naxos version is about 10% faster,
it does not sound "fast" in
comparison with the BIS version, yet
another lesson in the difference between
subjective and measured time. Naxos
has the edge here in both performance
and sound.
"The Turtle"
was written to a prose English text
from The Grapes of Wrath by John
Steinbeck, for Kirsten Flagstad in the
hope she would perform it and launch
on the concert stages of the world.
Unfortunately at this time the great
soprano was suffering from her final
illness, so it soon became clear there
was no hurry to finish the work as she
could never sing it, so it lay for unperformed
for 30 years. One immediately thinks
of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer
of 1915 (to a prose excerpt from
a novel by James Agee.), but the two
American works are very dissimilar,
particularly in the mood of the text,
even though both texts are noted for
their careful, detailed, non-poetic
descriptions of their respective circumstances.
The eponymous turtle is struggling to
cross a heavily travelled paved highway
without getting killed, whereas the
Barber work sets out to evoke a magical,
tranquil, nostalgic Summer evening mood.
The manuscript of Prokofiev’s
Second Piano Concerto was lost.
The only copy of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s
Concerto for Cello was burned
up in a fire at the printers. In both
of these cases, the scores could be
reconstructed from the memory of the
performers, but Geirr Tveitt suffered
the loss of over 80% of his music manuscripts
in a fire at his home. Fortunately,
the Fourth Concerto had been
performed several times and from these
sets of performing parts and existing
sketches, this performing edition could
be assembled after the composer’s death.
My impression of what
the Northern Lights (Nordljos
in Norwegian) ought to sound like comes
from planetarium shows where they have
been simulated, and accompanied by New
Age meditative style music generally
including moonbeam chorus. I have heard
that the Northern Lights do actually
have a sound of their own, not unlike
what one might expect from an electrical
atmospheric phenomenon, somewhat whispery
and crackly. The Fourth Concerto
is astringent, even clangorous, in sound,
and may be an attempt to capture this
kind of sound by one who has actually
heard it frequently. This is certainly
neither tranquil nor meditative music.
To someone living in the far North the
northern lights represent the cruel
and mysterious power of nature, especially
as they are generally only easily visible
in the depths of Winter.
While I can read French
and Castillian, bits of German and of
Ancient Egyptian, and recognise Portuguese
and even Catalá, Russian, Polish,
and Sanskrit, the Scandinavian language
section of the notes to this disk was
beyond my perception, and I thank Peter
Shore for telling me it truly is Norwegian
and not Swedish as one might expect
from a Swedish record company. They
don’t tell you what language it is because
I guess if you can’t read it it doesn’t
matter what language it is, but it might
be a courtesy to reviewers.
Paul Shoemaker
Håkon Austbø (4) Steinway D
piano; Sveinung Bjelland (1) (piano)