Customer Reviews

Orchestral Works 1963-1998

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Lidholm's music shows a kaleidoscopic mixture of styles, brilliantly balanced. His music is every bit as powerful and masterful as any post-world-war-two composer. This recording includes two sister works: "Greetings from an Old World" and the especially moving "Kontakion." Both reflect the two super powers: USA and USSR during the Cold War.

Ingvar Lidholm (b. 1921) was a member of Karl-Birger Blomdahl's radical Monday Group, started out as a composer inspired by Stravinsky, Bartók and Hindemith, and later turned to atonal and serial techniques, culminating in the powerful Poesis from 1963. Written for the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Philharmonic, it was a far more radically modern piece than they expected, but a brilliantly scored, imaginative, rich and inventive work with some striking textures and sonorities, which should - perhaps - appeal even to those who are wary of uncompromising serial modernism in general.

The composer of Greetings from an Old World (commissioned by the Clarion Society for the celebration of the bicentenary of the U.S.) is clearly the same as the composer of Poesis, but the style has grown less extrovert, more reflective and hymn-like - the work is based on a hymn by Heinrich Isaac, but the tune in question remains buried in the textures and figures until the end. Kontakion, from two years later, uses many similar techniques, but this time the hymn used as a Russian orthodox hymn for the dead, and the effect is again rather stirring and powerful.

Stund, när ditt inre is relatively recent (from 1998). A monologue for baritone and orchestra on a Stagnelius poem, it is again a dramatically urgent work, imaginatively written and scored. In short, then, this is a disc of consistently impressive, darkly attractive, dramatic works. The performances seem impeccable (the music was recorded in the presence of the composer) and the recorded sound is top notch BIS. I am not going to claim that Lidholm's music is going to change music history, nor that this is an essential acquisition, but I do recommend giving it a try.