MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 

alternatively
CD: MDT AmazonUK AmazonUS
Sound Samples & Downloads

Magnus LINDBERG (b.1958)
Orchestral Music
Tendenza (1982) [11:54]
Kraft (1985) [30:16]
Kinetics (1989) [12:39]
Marea (1990) [10:30]
Joy (1990) [26:39]
Corrente (1992) [10:48]
Corrente II (1992) [16:36]
Coyote Blues (1993) [11:54]
Arena (1995) [15:03]
Arena 2 (1996) [15:00]
Feria (1997) [17:04]
Gran Duo (1999-2000), for woodwind and brass [19:23]
Chorale (2001-02) [5:58]
Concerto for Orchestra (2003) [29:58]
Sculpture (2005) [22:56]
Avanti! Chamber Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (Tendenza; Corrente; Coyote Blues; Arena 2) Jukka-Pekka Saraste (Marea; Joy)
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen (Gran Duo; Chorale; Concerto for Orchestra; Sculpture; Kraft) Jukka-Pekka Saraste (Corrente II; Arena; Feria)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Jukka-Pekka Saraste (Kinetics)
The recordings with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra were made by and co-produced with the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE.
rec. 1989-2008
booklet with liner notes in English and Finnish
ONDINE ODE1110-2Q [4 CDs: 65:49 + 66:26 + 67:00 + 59:12]

Experience Classicsonline


Make no mistake, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg is a cutting-edge modernist nor has his blade been stropped smooth. It's severing is achieved through ragged saw-teeth and violent conflict. 

He attended classes given by Paavo Heininen at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy. Later he studied in Darmstadt with Ferneyhough and Lachenmann and with Donatoni at Siena and Grisey in Paris.
 
The works featured here have been riffled and reshuffled to present them broken from original couplings and sequenced early to late: 1982 to 2005.
 
Tendenza gives no quarter. Its upheaval and collisions are utterly committed. The shock-waves radiate outwards. Dissonance is the norm as is fragmentation and belligerence. Kraft is as obsidian-hard as Tendenza. It somehow embodies preferences for things that are fast and complicated. Its first of two segments ends in slowly turning scintillation. The second section quivers, squeaks and moans though ultimately rises to growling sharply accentuated aggression and a shriek of volleyed violence. Kinetics, written after a debilitating tropical illness forced silence on him for 18 months is more pointilliste than Kraft and Tendenza. Parts of it are redolent of Stravinsky's Petrushka though the music also lashes out with a vengeful goad and in viscous dissonance .
 
Marea starts with violent upheaval and nightmare bass-accented attack. As with Tendenza Avanti! sounds every bit the full orchestra - not scaled down at all. On the other hand, as the movement progresses, there are more foot and hand holds for the less ‘advanced’ listener and the accelerating rush speaks directly if with more wildness than we may be used to. A sprinting piano adds decorative pearlescent streamers and there is some degree of repetition to acclimatise the ears and mind. In this sense the music is a little closer to Silvestrov symphonies 4 and 5.
 
Joy is the third panel of the trilogy of Kinetics, Marea and Joy. It is dissonant yet has a softer impact but is just as complex in texture - with pianos, electronics and vividly recorded percussion.
 
Corrente for chamber orchestra shivers with eldritch life and references Stravinsky time and again but filtered through Darmstadt's disaffected alembic. Tragedy tolls out at the end. Corente II  is a rewrite of Corrente for full orchestra and is allowed much more space. There are some lyric insurgencies and plenty of generously rhythmic interest.
 
Coyote Blues is another chamber orchestra piece. This incorporates ululating material redolent of 1960s Hovhaness and Penderecki with baleful trombones and rolling and roiling waves of sound. A Petrushka-like delight is suddenly shaken free at 10:09.
 
Arena has an abundance of fine lines often seething in activity and rising to a high glowing voltage of shining writing for violins. This is closed off by a steady humming diminuendo.
 
Arena II is the original written but large rather like the Corrente pair but by no means as effective in its dénouement.
 
Feria is jewelled with little fanfare figures allocated to brass and woodwind as individuals.
 
Gran duo strips out the strings and percussion leaving us in a tension net between brass and woodwind. There are no lead soloists - not a concerto except that all these Lindberg works sound like Concertos for Orchestra. His title Concerto for Orchestra comes after Chorale - the shortest piece here and one written expressly as a companion to the Berg Violin Concerto. It makes frank play with Bach's Es ist genug. The Concerto for Orchestra is a single movement piece of about half an hour duration. Its demeanour and fantastically mercurial nature brought home to me that all his orchestral pieces are display effusions, Darmstadt or otherwise.
 
The final and most recent work is Sculpture. Violins are elided. Instead we hear an orchestra of quadruple woodwind, two thrumming pianos, two harps, organ, two Wagner tubas and full brass complement. Again this is a spectacular written to complement the vast space of the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. A touch of ancient Rome aside, this is very much another virtuoso race-course as well as reminiscent of Penderecki and Sibelius at his most the most enigmatic and his most heroic and most catastrophic. It operates as a sort of dissonant Pohjola's Daughter. This is a vast lapidary gauze in motion cut across with gritty rhythmic attack as at 18:11. Parts of this look towards the grand tone poems of David Mathews. The sunburst at 1830 onwards is redolent of the sunrise in Night-Ride and Sunrise complete with an extravagantly chattering organ. It’s a mite garrulous but full of delights in the manner of Silvestrov's psychedelia. It ends on an almost Baxian glow; so very different from the Tendenza of two decades before.

There’s a good English and Finnish booklet by Kimmi Korhonen which tells you what you want to know at about the right pace and length.
 
Avant-garde origins never quite let go - why should they - but brilliance, fantastic imaginative orchestra textures and Stravinskian mulch all add to the draw of this music.  

Rob Barnett
 

 


 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools






Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.