Described as a "crossover" opera, heavily
electronically processed vocals and electrified instruments here lurch
crazily between Anton Webern and Rock/Jazz. Sometimes works of this
type can achieve interesting rhythms or sonorities, even quite sensual
ones, but the composer’s talent seems to be dedicated to making everything
sound as ugly as possible. The poetry is the "heavy shit man"
variety where incomprehensibility alternating with maudlin banality
is taken for profundity, e.g.:
‘If you lose your sight
Don’t be afraid.
There’s so much work
To be done for the blind.
And people will be so kind.
If you wake up without your tongue,
Just stutter your way.
And you will see
What life can also be.’
It might sound better in Danish translation. If the
composer had told us which drug we should use to make this all clear
it might have helped. I can tell you that aspirin afterwards is a great
help.
The following statement from his website might clarify
matters: "Anders Nordentoft studied composition at the Royal Danish
Academy of Music in Copenhagen, where his teachers were Ib Nørholm
and Hans Abrahamsen. Further composition studies with Per Nørgård
at the Academy of Music in Aarhus. In his works Nordentoft challenges
himself with wild expressiveness and tensions, but must first and foremost
be described as a lyrical and narrative composer. Behind his fine feeling
for the immediate and the physical in music lies a delicate world of
poetry and childlike innocence." From the photograph, he seems
like a pleasant, even charming man. He wrote a Duo for Violin and
Flute in 1975, but most of his music bears titles which suggest
wild experiments.
Even if you really, really love the weird, exotic,
trendy, and experimental, try to hear some of this before you put your
money down.
Paul Shoemaker
Thomas Sandberg, vocals