Collection
PULSE: Contemporary solo piano music played by
Matti Hirvonen
IVO NILSSON Puls
JOHNANNES JANSSON The Nightingale
WERNER WOLF GLASER Preludium; Sospeso
MATS LARSSON GOTHE Ride of the
Valkyries
KJELL PERDER London Vertigo
MAURICE KARKOFF Fantasia for the Left
Hand
BO NILSSON Arctic
Romance
JAN SANDSTROM Campane in campi aperti
FOLKE RABE With Love 1 and 2.
Various; rec Swedish
Radio, Aug 1999 Feb 2000
DAPHNE 1012
Daphne
If you find yourself drawn to late night radio recitals of contemporary piano
music this will be bread and butter to you.
Hirvonen is closely recorded though not so much as to take the edge off his
advocacy of these unknown works.
The Ivo Nilsson has the piano played with maximum damping, slamming notes
like taut steel girders. Jansson is much more relaxed, bathed in a dreamy
atonality common also to Bo Nilsson's very romantic Arctic Romance, a breath
away from a Rachmaninov Etude Tableau. Glaser also trades in gentle dissonance
in both his pieces. The strike of polished pebbles marks the Gothe Valkyries.
Perder's London Vertigo can be likened to Eugene Goossens ' piano writing:
meltingly dissonant and edgily sleepy. Karkoff (a big name, like Bo Nilsson)
is represented by a fantasia in the spirit of a sepulchral drowned cathedral.
The Sandstrom work has the harsh concussion of a tenor stone bell. The two
Rabe items have a sly goblin smile and proceed from John Ireland via Schoenberg.
Good notes and excellent sound.
This is the sort of set you will return to again. Its rewards are patent.
It is a pity that the playing time is short.
Rob Barnet
