Hjalmar Borgstrøm (1864-1925)
Symphonic Poems
Tanken, Op 26 (1916)
Jesus i Gethsemane, Op 14 (1904)
Trondheim Symphony Orchestra/Eivind Aadland
rec. 2009, Olavshallen, Trondheim, Norway
cpo 777 491-2 [65]
The centenary of Hjalmar Borgstrøm’s death will soon be upon us though I doubt there will be a rush of discs. BIS released his Violin Concerto a number of years ago, which didn’t ripple the waters, and recently his opera The Fisherman has appeared, and was reviewed here by Göran Forsling, though it too dates from performances given years ago. Borgstrøm remains stubbornly unloved, by and large, or easily ignored.
Yet he was, as Göran Forsling writes, a highly professional composer as these two symphonic poems attempt to show. Tanken (The Thought) dates from 1916 when Borgstrøm, who was an exact contemporary of Richard Strauss, was 52. I’m not much of a lad for philosophy, I’m afraid, so it was with a plunging sense of doom that I read the poem that the composer instructs listeners to read before a performance of Tanken – there’s a lot of stuff about trees of knowledge, powers of darkness, universal faith and there’s a bit too about the Spirit’s engendering charge flashing from the Divine Eye. I wish I knew what it all meant.
The work is in five sections centrifugally oscillating around a central Adagio though hardly in the Bartókian arch scheme. He wants to suggest a sense of cosmic space which he does by establishing a tick-tocking theme, a kind of universal clock, I suppose (it’s quite easy to mock Borgstrøm, as you’ll have noticed, but he’s just about worth persevering with). The second and longest movement opens in crisis though this resolves to ochre-coloured strings and winds, incrementally gloomy and glowering, though there’s a nice linear cantilena hereabouts, before brass and percussion spit out. The gloom continues into the Adagio which embraces, for no reason at all, a fugato though there is a fluorescent grandeur to its gradual development. The fourth movement is subtitled ‘The Demon of Desire’ and at this I perked up, as who is not susceptible to the demon of desire. Well, there are hints of Johann Strauss’s Waltzes and Richard’s Rosenkavalier ones too, as well as Till, but I wanted some cosmic sex and I listened in vain. The finale is profuse with incident and there’s even a siren in there too, just in case you’re wondering whether your house is under attack. There’s a disorganised but energetic display of crypto-cinematic cataclysm before the return to cosmic space, with which we began, some days before. Well, only 42 minutes – it just feels like days.
Fortunately, Jesus i Gethsemane (1904)is cast in four conventional sections and is much shorter than Tanken. It charts a strong narrative that portrays Christ’s betrayal by Judas. Some of the motifs are reprinted in the booklet, the Gospel texts above the relevant musical passages – up to eight bars from several motifs; Fear, Judas, Christ’s compassion and more. This is a much more focused work and much more deserving of concentrated listening in its absorption of Parsifalian precedent. It’s true that some elements may strike one as sentimentalised – I’m thinking of the second panel’s violin solo with accompanying harp which might have functioned better as an interlude in a French Grand Opéra – and the March representing Judas seems compressed in its characterisation. The final panel is however an attractive slow movement that seals the work in a just resolution.
Though they are not without discursiveness – certainly Tanken is – these two tone poems at least have a sense of themselves. It’s appropriate, therefore, that the notes have been written by Eckhardt van den Hoogen, some of whose writing, at least, is related to the works in question.
I’m not sure this release, well played and recorded though it is, will much alter things in the Borgstrøm landscape but I will concede that I’m glad it exists, cosmically or otherwise.
Jonathan Woolf
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