Christoffer Sundqvist - Levitation: Eötvös, Nielsen, Sallinen (2011) CD-Rip

Here’s a strange and interesting CD if I’ve ever heard one. It begins with Peter Eötvös’s contemporary piece Read more written for two clarinets, accordion, and strings. But don’t break out your polka records for a comparison; this music is more of the style normally described as “contemporary ambient,” with brief shards of musical motifs drifting, interacting, and creating a mood rather than a work with a form that one can grasp. Ironically, I find it much more palatable than some of the contemporary music I’ve reviewed recently, such as Maxwell Davies’s Symphony No. 1 or the piano music of Judith Lang Zaimont. The first section depicts a hurricane scene in which phone boxes and traffic signs float on the violent winds, yet the music is not as violent as the description suggests. Its fragmentary nature, and reliance on a small group of instruments, results in an atonal yet somehow fascinating musical environment.

This is even truer of the second movement, which is said to represent a recurring dream of the composer in which he floats vertically across a landscape. (If anything, I find some wry, ironic humor in this music despite its building to a surprisingly loud and edgy climax in the middle.) The third movement, a barcarolle, is based on Eötvös’s impression of Venetian gondolas floating on the water. Occasional pizzicato strings flit out of the ensemble and float above the others; there is yet another edgy passage, for strings and accordion, that contrasts with the two clarinets (one high and one low); eventually, close seconds played by the clarinets with just a few violins are heard above a grunting bass line as the movement continues. A fast, busy passage played in rapid triplets then ensues, following which one of the clarinets plays close chromatics with some of the strings while the second clarinet weaves around them.

The last movement, “Petrushka’s Resurrection,” resuscitates the antihero of Stravinsky’s ballet to float above the cruel world and mock it. I am particularly struck by Eötvös’s subtle humor here as well as his equally subtle and deft manipulation of musical fragments and orchestration. I’d say that the music evokes Stravinsky rather than imitates him, and in this evocation Eötvös achieves some of his most remarkable and original moments. Each fragment within this movement dovetails, as if by magic, into the other fragments to create a whole.

Nielsen’s clarinet concerto is the one standard work on this disc, and Christoffer Sundqvist gives an altogether remarkable performance of it. His tone is both well controlled in vibrato as well as containing a beautiful, natural, woody quality, much like the best jazz clarinetists (think of Noone, Shaw, or de Franco). Yet although Hannu Lintu conducts a thoroughly professional, clean reading of the score, I am not as impressed overall by his interpretive qualities as I was by those of Douglas Bostock in the complete collection of Nielsen’s orchestral music on Membran 233378/A-J, which I reviewed in the last issue. Nevertheless, it’s a fine performance, particularly due to Sundqvists’s alternately lyrical and passionate playing. Just listen to the brilliance of his 16th-note playing in the first movement—not only technically excellent, but also with tremendous feeling. And his warmth is clearly evident in the well-phrased Poco Adagio as elsewhere when called upon to provide it. Time and again Sundqvist’s tone, as much as his technique, takes your breath away.

Aulis Sallinen’s clarinet-viola concerto, composed in 2006–07, has somewhat strange and enigmatic notes from the composer. The first movement, subtitled “The Dolphin’s Lament,” refers to two dolphins, a mother and her calf, who strayed into the Baltic Sea and drowned in a fisherman’s net. The second movement, titled “Les Jeux,” refers to playing music as a sort of game. As Sallinen puts it, “Any action based on playing is strange from a biological point of view, as it is not necessary for survival.” Indeed so. The third movement, “Adagio del Toro,” dwells on the cruel dichotomy of bullfighting as a sport.

Musically, Sallinen’s sound world is more tonal than Eötvös’s, the first movement rooted in F and played through much of the first half by solo viola and clarinet with an ominous undercurrent of timpani. When the strings do enter, it is the cellos and basses we hear at first, then the violas with xylophone. Both solo instruments become more agitated; edgy string tremolos are offset by arpeggios played by the glockenspiel. The latter half of the movement is almost calm, as if the animals have resigned themselves to their fate.

“Les Jeux” is a charming piece in a somewhat choppy and uneven meter, set more or less in C. Yet again, Sallinen is careful in his use of instrumental forces, allowing a great deal of exposure to the solo instruments with no attempt to compete with or cover them. There is even the hint of a real melody here in the second theme before rapid 16ths from the strings bring the music back into the realm of the fantastic, this time at an even faster tempo as the opening fragments coalesce into a theme and variants. The key eventually shifts to G, and there’s an almost Mozartian feel to some of the music here.

The “Adagio del Toro” has more of a melancholy cast than a fully tragic feel to it. In the notes, Sallinen makes it clear that his goal was to project the nobility of the bull as much as the suffering he faces in the arena, “forced to fight for its life.” (Quite ironically, I find several similarities in mood here to Alan Ridout’s Ferdinand the Bull in Rachel Barton Pine’s outstanding violin recital disc Capricho Latino. ) Eventually, the swell of the strings comes to overpower the mood of the piece, following which the cries of the clarinet simulate the attack on the bull. Moaning basses reflect the sadness of the animal and his hopeless situation, following which an uptempo passage seems to re-create the mood of the triumphant bullfighter. All in all, this is the most remarkable piece in the trilogy, though all of it is very fine music.

A brief word on the sound: the stereo layer of Alba’s hybrid SACD sonics emerges sharply and clearly from my non-SACD player, proving that you do not have to bathe the recording in aural goo in order to project good sound. Thanks, Alba! -- Lynn René Bayley