I recently reviewed
Trio con Forza, a bracing selection
of contemporary works performed by HOT3,
a group composed of viola, guitar and
flute. Hot on its heels comes this disc
of works almost all of which are dedicated
to the viola protagonist Henrik Frendin
and which sports the title Viola con
Forza. One intriguing aspect is that
the works have been written with him
in mind or in collaboration with him.
Frendin becomes, in the notes’ words,
co-creator of these pieces due to the
latitude for improvisation inherent
in them, as in the case of Henrik Frisk’s
Drive in which fragments are infinitely
variable and buildable upon.
Daniel Nelson’s Romantatronic
has a fair deal of romantic keening
and occasional granitic orchestral interjections.
In the main though there is a slow moving
rather threnody-like aspect to the work
that is astutely judged. Later on the
viola subverts the original schema and
disrupts the orchestral statements with
interjections of its own. The second
movement is elegant and rhythmic with
considerable elasticity of material
and a genuine aspiration to the condition
of song. Jörgen Dafgård’s
For the Sleeping: Dream Sonata is for
viola and tape. The sonorities generated
are intensely "swoony" with
the viola mining some viscerally onomatopoeic
sounds, whilst the tape mixes things
up in the channels to create a slightly
disorientating feeling. Some stridency
and drama is there but so too is a dream
lightness and a drizzle of ambient voices.
Kent Olofsson and Frendin
have collaborated on Alinea Variations
and it’s built on the foundations of
a similarly titled piece for string
quartet and computer. It manages to
fuse string simplicity with tempestuous
and sinuously tough writing. Olofsson’s
own Nepenthe for viola d’amore – a new
use for an old instrument – shows his
ruminative side and is very attractive.
With Wrong Music we are introduced to
Fredrik Söderberg, whose ambition
was to create with it a "chill-out
in a modern music context." I’m
not sure what this means but we have
a rather ceremonial whiff of Japanoiserie,
ceremonial bells and powerful brass,
playing repeatedly in alt and
a lot of bent notes. Henrik Frisk shows
distinct affinities with the Second
Viennese School with Drive (for Electric
Viola Grande and live electronics),
a short five-minute piece. The EVG is
a specially-designed five stringed instrument,
electrically amplified, which nevertheless
still tries to retain the acoustic principles
of the conventional viola. Frendin also
teams up with composer Fredrik Emilson
for Soft Christ, which, since the notes
speak of an ultimate convergence in
a "sacred epilogue," must
have some religious or spiritual significance.
Static sounding taps and hoarse exploratory
lines lead to an ascent into an almost
flute-like register.
There are some strong
imaginations at work in these disparate
works, majorly inspired by the violist-hero
Frendin. But what are we to make of
the fact that Soft Christ is dedicated
to ‘Siegfried and Roy, Masters of the
Impossible and somewhat mangled intimates
of domestic White Tigers’?
Jonathan Woolf
Henrik Frendin (viola, Electric Viola Grande,
viola d’amore with accompaniments as above)