Per Nørgård: Sinfonia austera; Symphony No. 2

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Nørgård (b. 1932) is one of the most important composers to come out of the Scandinavian countries since Nielsen and Sibelius. He uses many of the same strategies they did, including reliance on folk song material, but he also applies some of the tools of Modernism, which they eschewed. His Sinfonia austera (1955) is a quasi-tonal work of harsh atmospherics that never quite loses touch with a Romantic core. His Symphony 2 (1970) incorporates many of the same atmospherics as the Sinfonia austera, but it's a sound world all its own. This is part of an excellent, highly recommended series from Chandos. -- Paul Cook

Per Nørgård: Sinfonia austera; Symphony No. 2, Music, Per Norgard, Leif Segerstam, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Danmarks Radiosymfoniorkester, 20th/21st Century Symphony, Classical, Classical Composers, Classical Music, Symphonic

Average customer rating:

Norgard's lesser two symphonies, but still good listening

Good performances of less essential Norgard

An Auspicious Beginning

Nordic Nature-poetry at its best

Per Nørgård: Sinfonia austera; Symphony No. 2

Manufacturer: Chandos
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Symphonies | Forms & Genres | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music
Modern & 20th Century | Symphonies | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
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ASIN: B000000AYY
Release Date: 1996-05-21

Tracks:

Sinfonia Austera: I. Tempo moderato
Sinfonia Austera: II. Calmo, molto affetuoso
Sinfonia Austera: III. Allegro impetuoso
Symphony No. 2: Symphony No 2 - Tempo moderato

Amazon.com

Nørgård (b. 1932) is one of the most important composers to come out of the Scandinavian countries since Nielsen and Sibelius. He uses many of the same strategies they did, including reliance on folk song material, but he also applies some of the tools of Modernism, which they eschewed. His Sinfonia austera (1955) is a quasi-tonal work of harsh atmospherics that never quite loses touch with a Romantic core. His Symphony 2 (1970) incorporates many of the same atmospherics as the Sinfonia austera, but it's a sound world all its own. This is part of an excellent, highly recommended series from Chandos. -- Paul Cook

Customer Reviews:

Norgard's lesser two symphonies, but still good listening.......2006-06-28

This Chandos CD is the first in its series of Per Norgard's symphonies performed by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam. Neither the "Sinfonia Austera", the Danish composer's first try at the genre, nor the Symphony No. 2 are the most impressive of Norgard's six symphonies to date, but they are nonetheless worth hearing. Not only are they important in understanding the composer's overall development, but they help one grasp other works, as I shall clarify below.

Norgard wrote "Sinfonia Austera" (1955-1956) at the age of 22, yet this is by no means juvenalia. During this time, the composer was interested in typical "Nordic" features, i.e. the soundworld of Vagn Holmboe, Hilding Rosenberg, and Jean Sibelius and the "klang" tone that was paramount in their style. While much of the symphony looks back--there's even a direct reference to Sibelius' "Tapiola"--Norgard introduces his own innovations. Motivic material is distributed among instrumental groups for maximum diversity of timbre, tonality is quite free for Nordic music, and there's a sense of space and an occasional violence about the music that explains Norgard's reputation as a budding young modernist. In spite of all this, I rarely return to the work because it pales next to the incredible theoretical breakthroughs of his later symphonies, such as the infinity series processes of the second and third, and the schizoid Wolfli style of the fourth. However, a familiarity with "Sinfonia Austera" is vital towards understanding Norgard's mysterious and highly autobiographical fifth symphony, which alludes to "Sinfonia Austera" in its dramatic conclusion.

Through the 1960s Norgard experimented with his "infinity series", a method of serializing melody that has fractal-like properties of self-similiarity and unending richness to explore packed into a simple course of events. For most of the decade, the infinity series was only one tool in Norgard's toolbox, but in "Voyage Into the Golden Screen" for chamber ensemble (1968), he used it to shape all facets of a work. Knowing something about "Voyage" is very helpful to understanding the infinity series works in general. In the second movement, a given melody is played by the flutes in what can be called "normal time", while the oboes play every fourth note, the trumpets every 64th note, and tubular bells, trombones, and piano every 256th note, and so on for 1024 notes. All music is generated from one simple process.

The "Symphony No. 2" (1970) can fairly be described as an expansion of "Voyage", playing 4,096 notes of the infinity series with the instrumentation of a symphony orchestra. But it's much more than that, since while "Voyage" was entirely automatic, the symphony contains a clear development. Before the series is introduced, divided among the instruments, one single note begins the work and all proceeds from it. Then, every 1,024 notes of the series, the trumpets interrupt in a striking fashion. All this gives a sense of growth before the symphony fades out at the end. All in all, however, the symphony is somewhat limited and impersonal. Norgard hadn't yet thought up harmonic and rhythmic analogues to the melodic infinity series, which came to be the natural overtone series and the golden section respectively. These three were united in his glorious third symphony of 1975, which many consider his masterpiece. The second symphony, then, hovers between two worlds, being either "Voyage" enlarged or the third symphony in miniature.

If you are a fan of Norgard, and everyone very well should be, you'll want this disc. For an introduction to the great Danish composer's work, however, I'd recommend the Da Capo disc "Borderlines"-"Dream Play"-"Voyage Into the Golden Screen" or the Chandos disc "Symphony No. 3"-"Concerto in due tempi".

Good performances of less essential Norgard.......2003-12-18

This disc collects together the first two symphonies by the prominent Danish composer Per Norgard. The first symphony (or Sinfonia Austera, as its title has it) was written in 1955, when the composer was 21, and is a student work--though a very accomplished one--while the second symphony of 1970 can be said to be the composer's first fully mature work.

Sinfonia Austera is a very ambitious work for a young student. Lasting half an hour, it is written in three movements: the first is a moderately fast, very Nordic-sounding canvas which slowly, inexorably builds to a climax, the second movement is slower and less dramatic, while the finale takes the brief motifs which the first movement began with and develops them in ever-more vigorous writing. This work doesn't entirely transcend its heritage--the influence of Norgard's teacher Vagn Holmboe is very obvious, as is that of Sibelius' Tapiola--nor does it quite live up to the rather elevated standard of its models, but it nonetheless retains this listener's interest.

The Second Symphony finds a very different Norgard--though in truth the harmonic language here is not as far from that of Sinfonia Austera as one might think on first listening. This was the first work he entirely based on what he called the Infinity Series, a mathematical trick for generating infinitely long melodic material of which he could use appropriate-sounding chunks. The use of it is rather bald in this work--all the musical material uses the same chunk, starting from the same note but progressing at different rates. This means that the work starts with one reiterated single note (a very late-60s/early-70s thing) and gradually diversifies and complexifies over its 20-minute duration before reaching a conclusive climax. I find this work curiously restrained in comparison to the positively orgiastic Third Symphony, written only five years later--perhaps Norgard was not fully aware of the potential of his new compositional technique at the time of writing this work?

This is probably the least essential of the four Chandos discs devoted to Norgard's symphonic output, but it is not without interest--particularly given the excellent performance of the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under Leif Segerstam.

An Auspicious Beginning.......2003-02-27

I have just recently aquired all of the Norgard symphonies on Chandos and will spend many happy hours going through them all. But this disc, which represents Norgard's first foray into the form, has already captured my imagination. These two symphonies show both Norgard in potentia and the first flowering of his singular genius.

Norgard's symphonies are perhaps the best way to introduce yourself to this marvelous composer. He has written at least one every decade of his active career and all of his important stylistic periods are represented in the form except the avant-garde period of the mid 60s. Stylistically, they continue a line of symphonic development that is uniquely Norse, relating to Sibelius and Nielsen by way of Norgard's teach Vagn Holmboe. This is most obvious in the Sinfonia Austera.

Written when Norgard was in his 20s, the Sinfonia is an amazing work for a student composer, perhaps equalled only by Shostakovitch's student work, Symphony No. 1. The Norgard symphony is clearly in the Scandanevian tradition. It is dark and brooding, but with flashes of light against the mists. Cast in three movement, the work starts in the nether regions with a craggy, brooding opening movement, moves into a calm lyrical movement and ends with an explosive allegro. The work is tonal, but just barely. Norgard seems to have married the style and structural innovations of his teacher Holmboe with an almost Bergian melodic and harmonic sense. And yet, the final triads of the piece seem to grow organically from the rest of the work. If this symphony has grown neglected, it is only because later Norgard is so extraordinary that this work can get overshadowed. It's too bad. I believe that if Norgard had never left this style, he would still be a symphonist to be reckoned with.

The Symphony No. 2 is an entirely new kettle of fish. Written in the late 60s and premiered in 1970, this work follows up on Norgard's discoveries related to what he calls the infinity series. This series was first "discovered" by Norgard in the late 50s and had been used as a serial technique in avant-garde works of the 60s, but starting with his orchestral piece, Voyage Into the Golden Screen (reviewed by me on the set that includes the opera Gilgamesh) he begins to use this series in new ways. The infinity series is created by interlocking a series and it's inversion by a specified interval and then using the intervals between these interlocking series as the generative force for further intervals. In theory, the series can continue ad infinitum. The series has many fascinating properties. It can be applied to any scale, chromatic, tonal, modal or acoustic. And if you play every fourth note, you get an exact replica of the series in a different key. There are many of these exact replicas in the series, making it a particularly intriguing example of what chaos theroists would now call "fractal" music.

Where Voyage Through a Golden Screen presented the series starkly, Symphony No. 2 begins to explore the inherrant artistic qualities of the procedure. The work begins with a long static passage on a single note. This note gradually expands into a chord based on the harmonic series. Then the infinity series begins, mostly in eighth note movement. Other instruments start to play the series in different layered tempi, based on the internal hierarhies of the series itself. The result of this admittedly dry sounding procedure is sonically rich. The section is dominated by these undulating clouds of sound, which in many ways resemble Gyorg Ligeti's work of the same period, but with a clearer sense of polyphony and a greater tonal and harmonic stability. The effect is broken by increasingly insistent "fanfares" based on the overtone series. A lovely climax is reached and the piece then recedes back into the single tones in which it opened...sort of like the opening and closing of Wagner's Ring cycle.

The performance and sound on this Chandos disc is exemplary. I've had the good fortune to hear the Second Symphony live, and the experience on this disc is every bit as powerful. This is truly a great start to an integral symphonic cycle by one of our most intriguing living composers.

Happy listening!

Nordic Nature-poetry at its best.......2000-08-01

Norgard's 1st symphony (Austera) is not only interesting as an example of where he originally came from compositionally. It is also an extraordinarily impressive composition in its own right. It is Austere not so much in the sense that it is either epigrammatic or sparely scored. Its austerity is more to do with the stern and hard-edged character of much of the music, which inhabits a world full of natural sounds and events, but entirely without humans. Think of Sibelius or Nielsen at their darkest, and you might get some idea of the work's predominant tone - one common to many Nordic composers. Also present are the beginnings of Norgard's very individual and distinctive mature style: a certain organic fluidity to the rhythmic and harmonic flow, and a gift for creating musical mechanisms that appear to be neither mechanistic nor organic, but a strange combination of the two. In contrast, the Second symphony in some ways shows Norgard at his most radical. But don't be afraid - the work is actually also one of his most accessible and beguiling creations. The entire work springs from a single 'infinity series' - a technical invention of Norgard's which produces an endless stream of gradually rotating and transforming figures. The effect of this is hypnotic, as if one is watching a multifacteted crystal slowly rotating in space. This is enhanced by the scoring, with bells and other tuned percussion creating a gamelan-like effect. Even after repeated listenings, the magic of this wonderfully simple and yet marvellously sophisticated music never becomes less. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Performances are terrific, and the Chandos sound is ideal - rich and spacious.

Track Listings:

Track Listings

track listings

Track Listings

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'Round About Midnight

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