Lasse Thoresen (b. 1949)
Lyden av Arktis (The Sound of the Arctic)
Arktisk Filharmoni/Christian Kluxen
rec. 2021, STORMEN konserthus, Bodø, Norway.
2L RECORDS 2L-169-SABD [65]
The Sound of the Arctic was commissioned by the Arktisk Filharmoni, with the intention that the music should reflect the wild variety of Norway’s northernmost regions. Its various movements are scored for different ensembles (sinfonietta, string orchestra, and full symphony orchestra), each movement designed to be playable separately or performed as a single work as it appears here.
Conductor Christian Kluxen describes The Sound of the Arctic as “an acoustic atlas of the Arctic: a musical expedition that reaches as far into the Earth’s interior as it does into our minds and souls. It stands both as a multi-dimensional cultural and historical fable and as an environmental statement – with a breadth that envelops hope, beauty and nature’s untamed forces, beginning with the Arctic wind’s warning whisper, and ending with humankind’s inevitable apocalypse.”
There is indeed a massive range of effects and emphatic musical statements – a sort of conveyer belt of Arctic impressions and interpretations. The opening, Only White, is “a huge white landscape” inhabited by strong winds, ice and seabirds introduce a Looming Glacier whose impressive mass is expressed in block chords. Flights of birds emerge from muted brass and winds in Sky, Flocks and Flight, and Encounters Recalled incorporates Sami music into an homage to the people who have inhabited the Arctic for ages past and present. There is a rousingly festive movement in Fiddle Feasts, but the whole thing builds to the penultimate movement, Hymn to the Untouched, which “expresses my awe of everything that lives in the far north – so vulnerable, so powerful, and so wonderful in its ability to adapt.” An extended, slow, hymn-like melody grows on top of overtone-rich chords, the full orchestra at times bowling us over with beauty, and at other times shimmering with wintry threat. Collapse is as noisy and frenetic as you might expect.
As is commonly the case with releases from 2L this recording comes with SACD hybrid and Blu-ray versions for all of your immersive surround-sound needs. I wanted to love this piece but came away unconvinced. It is up against some stiff competition in works such as Rautavaara’s wintry and haunting Cantus Arcticus, or the grandeur of Messiaen’s landscapes and detailed observations of nature in something like Des canyons aux etoiles. Wind noises and icy plink-plonk sounds set an atmosphere but don’t really add anything new, and the folk-fiddles are fun but ultimately don’t search far beyond stereotype. Everything is played superbly and the recording is of course spectacular even in standard stereo. You will need to sample this for yourself to decide if, as claimed, it is “a work of such size and breadth” that it has the potential of “becoming an accepted masterpiece on a par with the greatest compositions that reach down meaningfully to the depths of our souls, like Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde or Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony.”
Dominy Clements
Contents
Bare hvitt (Only White)
Brefront (Looming Glacier)
Himmelflokk og flukt (Sky, Flocks and Flight)
Minnemøter I: Fire Arktiske atmosfærer (Encounters Recalled I: Four Arctic Atmospheres)
Minnemøter II: (Encounters Recalled II: Soul Journey)
Høgtid — mørketid — lystid (Solemn Times — Dark Times — Bright Times)
Slåttemylder og fest (Fiddle Feasts)
Hymne til det urørte (Hymn to the Untouched)
Kollaps (Collapse)
