Grappa

Arve Tellefsen has always interspersed his heavy-duty espousal of the Scandinavian repertoire with lighter fare. So there have been albums with names such as Arco, Intermezzo and Stille Natt to leaven the serious work. And what work! How much the poorer we would be without this splendid musician’s discs devoted to Nordheim, Valen, Bull, Larsson, Nielsen, Elling, Svendsen, Berwald, Sinding, Sjøgren, Wirén, Aulin and a number of others – this to say nothing of the standard repertoire. How much sparser the discography would be without Tellefsen.

Here he kicks back his shoes. Forget Valen’s pocket concerto, dismiss thoughts of Dag Wirén. The beaming visage of the grizzled fiddler is surrounded by cherubic and smiling faces drawn from the Nidarosdomens Guttekor. This is a “choir, orchestra and solo violin” disc that demands nothing except enjoyment and that makes no demands beyond the succulent. Nothing wrong with that.

The notes are minimal and my Norwegian is non-existent but I can tell you that the orchestrations are by Knut Anders Vestad and that some of the arrangements come from Oivind Westby. That said there’s not a huge amount of scribing to be done here. Tellefsen has an extended run on that incongruous advertisement favourite Lascia Chio Pianga (harpsichord, some decoration) but modestly abstains from the solo-choir-orchestral arrangement of Ave Maria. The problem is to integrate the violin into the choral and orchestral fabric and this often involves initial choral statements, a violin “middle eight” and a return to the warm textures of choir and orchestra.

The choral repertoire here is traditional – broadly Rutteresque. There’s even one piece by Rutter himself, sung in Norwegian. Tellefsen has a hand in the Casals arrangement – warm and sympathetic. There are times when he’s got little to do but twiddle away. He’s rather redundant in the Parry, simply adding a few decorative fills and there are perhaps too many times when this happens. He takes the central section of You’ll Never Walk Alone and the choral and orchestral forces do the honours in the outer ones, though the Kop on a Saturday afternoon has little to fear in matters of heft.

Pleasant listening for Summer evenings – glass in hand, the sky cloudless blue. And don’t worry what Norman Lebrecht would make of it all.

Jonathan Woolf

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