Geirr Tveitt - Baldur's Dreams; Telemarkin

Geirr Tveitt

Baldur's Dreams / Telemarkin

Stavanger Symphony Orchestra

Ole Kristian Ruud

The story about the disaster that hit Geirr Tveitt in the early seventies is by now rather well known - a fire at his farm consumed most of his huge output (some say about 75 % of it, but several works once presumed lost have resurfaced later) leaving the composer a broken man for the rest of his life. The ballet (or `symbolic play for dance and orchestra in three acts') Baldur's Draumar - according to the composer himself one of his most important works - was however believed to be lost before then, namely during the London blitz during World War II. The reconstruction, of which this recording was the result, was originally based on a 1938 recording of an Oslo performance undertaken by the Russian composer Alexei Rybnikov, but it was supplemented through the Norwegian composer Kaare Dyvik Husby's discovery of substantial parts of the original full score and various orchestral parts. Hence, the work recorded here should in fact be pretty close to the original composition.

And it is a masterpiece of such color and drive that it is worthy of comparison with the Ravel and Bartok ballets - in fact, `the Wooden Prince' might give you a certain idea about the style, but Tveitt's music is infused with the rhythms, melodic contours and spirit of his native country; this is music of high, craggy mountain peaks, avalanches, deep, cold fjords and seas, dark mysterious forests and bleak winter mornings. The power and sheen of the music is partly a result of Tveitt's excellence at instrumentation (and such touches as the astounding sections for nine tuned drums and masses of other percussion). The work is set in four long sections with spoken introductions (very effective), where the final one must be one of the most powerful pieces of music ever written, but also the other ones (the soaring melody sung without words in the first movement for instance) are full of superb ideas and glittering textures. (side-note: Tveitt's Sun-God Symphony, available on a different BIS recording, is based on thematic material from this work, but do not for a second think that having the latter gives you anything close to an idea about what the whole ballet is like; the symphony does, for instance, not utilize the best melodic ideas or most viscerally powerful parts of the ballet). It is, in short, a glorious work, big-boned, Romantic, full of fantastic ideas, shimmering textures and fabulous tunes.

As a coupling BIS gives us the cantata Telemarkin for speaker, mezzo-soprano, Hardanger fiddle and orchestra, a work that frankly pales pretty badly in comparison with the main work. It is still a rather effective work (though the text is really inane) with some very attractive, atmospheric music. In any case, the performances provided by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra under Ole Kristian Ruud are marvelously committed, colorful and powerful. The score is obviously challenging, to say the least, but the performance it receives here is scintillating from the orchestra as well as from the soloists, and the sound quality is superb. In short, this is a tremendous release, urgently recommended