Andriessen / Kint / Van Nuenen / Luymes - Dutch Airlines - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Pianist Peter Friis Johansson has brought togetherrenowned musicians, including violinist Johan Daleneand soprano Sofie Asplund, for a programme thatjuxtaposes three generations of Swedish composers. Thevocal and chamber works performed here testify to thespecial place these genres occupy in Swedish art musicand to the vitality of musical societies in the earlytwentieth century, which sparked an interest that wentfar beyond easily digestible music.Andreas Hallen is the oldest of the composers featuredhere. His Piano Quartet shows great confidence despitebeing an early work. Like many composers of hisgeneration, Hallen readily incorporates folk elements.Wilhelm Stenhammar produced an important andvaried body of work. His Violin Sonata is a work thatreflects the ideals of his German education it is absolutemusic without any explicit extra-musical narrativecontent, a 'synthesis of classicism and sensitive poetry',as his first biographer put it. Sara Wennerberg-Reuter isthe least-known of the three, and many of her scoresremain unpublished. Stockholm's only female organistwith a permanent position, she left behind a varied bodyof work spanning a wide range of styles. She distancedherself from her contemporaries with a musical stylethat focused on melody, a commodity she felt had bythen become scarce.

Although much of the music of the Dutch composer Hendrik Andriessen (1892-1981) has now been explored in recordings, his works for piano largely remain to be discovered. This first conspectus of his piano music covers fifty years of composition, showing how early influences - among them Bach, Brahms, Franck, Hindemith and Ravel - were subsumed into a musical language distinguished by it's textural clarity and harmonic warmth. Five of the works on this are receiving their world premiere recording. Jacob Nydegger, a native of Texas, studied with Blanca Rodriguez, winning first prize at the seventeenth annual Petroff Piano Competition and receiving the Outstanding Perfomer award at Texas State Solo and Ensemble Contest in 2012 and 2013. Since then he has studied under Seth Carlin at Washington University in St. Louis, and he currently studies with Joseph Banowetz at the University of North Texas.

Precious little Dutch polyphonic music survives from the middle ages. Whatever is left consists of fragments of manuscripts, now kept at the university libraries of Utrecht, Leiden and Amsterdam, dating from around 1400. This means that a significant number of compositions come down to us in an incomplete state voices are missing, and some of the music has become illegible. To make a larger portion of this repertoire accessible to the public, some of the fragments have been restored digitally, some of the lacunary pieces have been reconstructed ('recomposed') by ensemble leader Niels Berentsen. The exact provenance of the fragments is difficult to assess with certainty, but what is clear is that they originated from the Dutch language-area in all collections we find songs on Middle-Dutch texts. It is probable that the fragments originated around the court of the county of Holland in The Hague, or in the urban environment of Utrecht, the bishop's residence. With this album, Diskantores presents a cross section of this unique, multifaceted repertoire. Liturgical pieces could have been performed as part of a mass, while secular pieces with Dutch, French or German texts would have been sung in a private circle of connoisseurs, or during festivities at the court. This then presents a project that perfectly fits muso off the beaten track, full of joy and beautifully performed by a young vocal ensemble, joined here by Jacques Meegens on a medieval organ whose sounds leave no one indifferent. A musical treat that will lift all spirits!