Einar Røttingen - Harald Sæverud: The Complete Piano Music (1999)

"There are hundreds of tunes waiting to be written," Harald Sæverud once said. Really, but it takes an exceptional vigilance to catch them, a vigilance that Sæverud possessed to an unusually large degree. He had the ability to see and hear things that escape most of us. Everything in his music is largely his own: the Angular melodic forms, his harmonic language, his treatment of rhythm and his unique orchestration. Severud's music can often be painfully beautiful, but he refuses to entertain us for long: he places the listener as the recipient of the impulses of life and nature - the beautiful, but also the unforgiving, the grotesque, the fun and the ugly.

Harald Sæverud is considered by many to be the most important and distinct composer from Norway since Edvard Grieg, and as a symphonic composer no one from his home country can challenge his position. Still, he wrote a number of works for piano - another page of his list of works that contains some of his most popular compositions. On this 3CD album, pianist Einar Røttingen has collected and recorded all the composer's piano works.

The emergence of a new generation of dedicated interpreters, such as Einar Røttingen, is essential to the rise of dedicated listeners of Sæverud's music. Einar Røttingen was born in Bergen and since his acclaimed debut in 1987 has been a soloist with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Southern Jutland Symphony Orchestra. His performances reflect his extensive interest in music of various styles and periods, with a special enthusiasm for contemporary music. Both as a practitioner and an educator, Røttingen is characterized by a strong urge to communicate new ways within repertoire as well as teaching. As one critic has written, "he has as few others an ability to identify with the music."