Elisabeth Holmertz - Botschaft des Ridicolas (2022) Hi-Res

When the uncompromising duo Elisabeth Holmertz and Kenneth Karlsson finally release their long-awaited album on LAWO Classics, Botschaft des Ridicolas (Message of the Ridicolas), we find Norwegian and German contemporary music on the menu. These works both build on and tear down parts of the traditional “song/piano” instrumentation. Three works that are in different ways about what we lost, without getting anything back. Three works that basically challenge a singer and a musician.

On “Botschaft des Ridicolas (Message of the Ridicolas)” we hear “Got Lost” by Helmut Lachenmann – a 30-minute long wild and poetic work that has become a modern classic, and which is supposedly one of the composer’s own favorites. The quiet, sensual, melancholic “Meditasjon over Georges de La Tour XVII” by Jon Øivind Ness; and finally Rolf Wallin’s desperate, punk work “…though what made it has gone.” The texts performed here are by eminent poets such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Fernando Pessoa, Paal-Helge Haugen, and Osip Mandelstam.

This recording has been made possible with support from Arts Council Norway / The Audio and Visual Fund, CREO – The Union for Arts and Culture, Fund for Performing Artists, Norwegian Society of Composers.

Kenneth Karlsson and Elisabeth Holmertz worked together for the first time in 2005 in Henrik Hellstenius’ opera Ophelias: Death by Water Singing. They began their collaboration as a duo playing and performing Scandinavian romantic music, but currently work within a large musical spectrum. A primary part of their work is today’s classical music and collaboration with leading pioneers of our time such as Helmut Lachenmann, Klaus Lang, Rolf Wallin, and Carola Bauckholt, among others. The duo also has a passion for lieder, Scandinavian romanticism, and performing popular music (like Bob Dylan, Josephine Foster, etc.) in new and different ways, together with Karlsson’s Indian harmonium.

Karlsson-Holmertz also created the group Vollen United, a genre-crossing group focused on baroque and current music, made up of various instrumentations. Members include Fredrik Bock, theorbo; Per T. Buhre, baroque violin; Karin Hellqvist, violin; Poul Hexbro, low whistle; along with Kenneth Karlsson, Indian harmonium; and Elisabeth Holmertz, soprano and electronics.