Nørholm,
like Niels Viggo Bentzon, is a native of Copenhagen. He studied
at the Royal Danish Academy of Music 1950-56 and spent some tme
as a music critic before becoming organist at Bethlehems Church,
Copenhagen. He has written various works around the writings of
Hans Christian Andersen. The six movement symphonic fantasy Hearing
Andersen is drawn from his music for Danish TV commission
for a score to a TV producton of The Shepherdess and the
Chimney Sweep. This is lightly dissonant but certainly not
dodecaphonic. Rather than writing within a method Nørholm
moves quite freely from almost Tchaikovskian fantasy to the dissonantly
macabre often making very great play of solo instrumental lines.
There are many melodramatic gestures along the way as in the riushing
and skittering Postlude. While Hearing Andersen can be
pretty tough going especially after the first movement, the four
movement Shadow (another Andersen piece) is much
more accessible in a style comparable with Ravel's Ma Mere
l'Oye yet surreal and in the case of The Triumph of The
Shadow macabre and ruffianly with percussion cannonades and
caustic Weill-like march fragments. The Fifth Symphony is
in four movements depicting the elements of air, earth, fire and
water. This is pretty uncompromising stuff on the same rhapsodic-phantasmagoric
limb as Frankel's symphonies. Conflict rends the world in the
finale which is rife with drum assaults and the savagery of the
brass offset with some extremely imaginative ‘tse-tse’ buzzing
and squeaking for the solo violin.
The
notes are by Mogens Andersen and the composer.
Nørholm
in uncompromising dodecaphonic robes for the symphony but less
so in the two imaginative suites.
Rob
Barnett
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Michael
Schønwandt (Andersen), Tamás Vetö (Shadow),
Jan Latham-Koenig (Symphony)