Per Nørgård – Symphony No. 8

The other conductor filling in the blanks in a symphony cycle is John Storgårds. With the Oslo Philharmonic, Storgårds has previously recorded four of Per Nørgård‘s eight symphonies (numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6) on a couple of discs released by DaCapo in 2016, which i explored at the time. Recordings of the remaining four symphonies were already available on DaCapo – 1 and 8 by Sakari Oramo with the Vienna Philharmonic, 3 and 7 by Thomas Dausgaard with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra (i reviewed the UK premières of No. 3 in 2018 and No. 7 in 2012) – which perhaps explains why Storgårds stopped at that point. However, he’s got going again, now for the BIS label and with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, on a new album including Symphony No. 8. It’s only the second time this symphony has been recorded, featured here alongside another orchestral piece, Lysning, and the Three Nocturnal Movements for violin, cello and orchestra.

Of these, Lysning is by far the most enigmatic. Composed in 2006 for string orchestra, and with a duration of less than five minutes, it’s as if the piece were saying everything and nothing at the same time. The title translates to “glade” or “clearing”, yet if anything the music’s continual tilting between light and shadow suggests walking beneath the denser forest canopy as the sunlight continually changes overhead. The strings surge forward, recede back, opening and closing, presenting glimpses of a song that appears to have neither beginning nor end, moving in and out of focus along the way. There’s something tantalisingly provisional, or peripheral, about it (reinforced by its blank, totally unexpected ending), and as a consequence i find it leaves me fascinatingly unsettled everytime i listen to it.

i explored the world première of the Three Nocturnal Movements back in 2016, and it’s good to revisit the piece in this recording, which was made in 2019, featuring the same orchestra and soloists, violinist Peter Herresthal and cellist Jakob Kullberg. What i didn’t appreciate at that time was the extent to which Kullberg himself created this piece, which is in essence a double adaptation / arrangement (or, to use Kullberg’s term, “transmogrification”). In 2013, Kullberg adapted Nørgård’s viola concerto Remembering Child for the cello (a recording of which was released a couple of years ago); since then, Kullberg has pursued a Masters degree exploring creative collaborations, and returned to the work a second time to create the Three Nocturnal Movements, now spun into a double concerto.

In a recent conversation, Kullberg said to me that he “only touched the orchestration to steal something for the soloists”, and this goes a long way to clarify why it is that (as i noted in 2016) throughout the work the violin and cello are absolutely in the foreground, while the orchestra is at most an accompanying or atmospheric presence. In the context of nocturnal music, this is absolutely no bad thing, lending the piece an extreme intimacy that’s gently expanded, answered, elaborated and couched by the orchestra. The opening ‘Allegro’ is nothing of the sort, following an altogether more contemplative impulse, to the extent that it almost sounds absent-minded, like singing without concentrating on what’s being sung, simply enjoying the act of singing. In this respect, Herresthal and Kullberg sound absolutely magnificent, both in their own right, following their respective melodic trajectories, and as a tightly-bound duet. The third movement (corresponding to the second movement of the original concerto) is more intense, though its first half is intriguing in the way the orchestra repeatedly seeks to kickstart something – or just be a bit more demonstrative – with loud bursts of clatter, but is completely ignored by the soloists. Only later (essentially third time lucky) do the violin and cello get on board, but even though the music becomes rambunctious and angular – the piece at its most playful – it’s not for long. Instead it settles back into a lovely kind of non-calm with a palpable sense of inner motion, like a rolling, churning current below the relatively calm surface of the sea. Like Lysning, the piece kind of fizzles at its close, which adds to a nocturnal sense of whooziness.

The central movement is entirely new, derived from a private audio recording of Nørgård playing piano, fragments of which Kullberg worked into a ‘nocturnal cadenza’. This is where the tone of the work is most extreme, going beyond mere nocturnality into something initially ghostly and vaporous, later caught in a translucent kind of ecstatic suspension. The defocusing of the music runs the risk of causing an equal defocus in the listener, but i can’t help feeling that, conversely, this works to amplify the prevailing atmosphere and create a dreamlike haze that’s more immersive than anything else.

The highlight of the disc, though, is Symphony No. 8, heard here in a new recording made in February last year. In many ways it sounds like the polar opposite to the more inscrutable ideas presented in the other two works. The exception, of course, is its middle movement, where the work is caught between letting lyricism unfurl and becoming lost in moments of reverie and fever dream. This is liminal music, at a continual cusp of changing states, and as such, the times when Nørgård allows a melodic tendril to blossom slightly result in a contrasting impression of extreme focus.

This focus is felt to be even stronger due to the nature of the surrounding movements, which aren’t exactly unfocused, yet are so burgeoning with ideas that they can often feel overwhelming, impossible to parse. Nonetheless, to be plunged into the maelstrom of the opening movement, with its multitude of simultaneous ideas, is thrilling, giving a sense not of densely packed but broadly dispersed material, made easier to negotiate through a tendency to oscillate back and forth from chamber-like reductions, even dropping to a lone voice two-thirds through. Its primary attitude is restlessness, driven by an unrelenting impulse above all to keep going (which is my interpretation of the instruction ‘tempo giusto’, as there’s nothing remotely regular about the music’s momentum), an impulse that allows for continual wide swings between power and delicacy, heft and weightlessness, noise and sparkle.

Having passed through the central dream, the third movement restarts this momentum, channelled now into a rapid passing of ideas that seems hugely quicker than the mere ♩=90 in the score. More than before it’s practically impossible to latch onto anything specific, sound images fleeting past with only occasional examples of tangibility: a phrase faintly evoking the chimes of Big Ben; a sequence of beats that are quickly lost in the tutti energy. It’s clearly more about the expression of energy and creativity than about coalescing it into well-defined shapes, and being as it is the final movement of the composer’s last symphony, it’s among the most breathtaking symphonic finales you’re ever likely to hear.

As i mentioned at the start, Symphony No. 8 has only been recorded once before, by the Vienna Philharmonic with Sakari Oramo. On balance, i’m more convinced by Storgårds and the Bergen Philharmonic’s interpretation. The VPO, as one would expect, deliver quite incredible beauty in their performance, which is arguably its defining characteristic. In addition, one gets the impression Oramo is trying to clarify a more structured symphonic argument, while Storgårds revels in the organised mess of ideas streaming past and strewn around. Surprisingly, the VPO show less cohesion in the middle movement, seeming a bit lost in its changing states, though the ending is genuinely marvellous, its unexpected accents coming as a real shock. They also present a nice impression of dirty lyricism in the finale, coating the turbulence in glittering colour, and their dynamic range (from a performing rather than recording perspective) seems wider than Bergen’s. That orderliness from Oramo also brings a touch more clarity to the last movement than Storgårds is aiming for. But Symphony No. 8 isn’t about clarity or order, it’s music at the edges, at the extremes even, flying by the seat of its pants unafraid of whether or not we’re able to keep up with its endless invention and unstoppable pace. Storgårds and Bergen capture and stay true to that exhilarating sensibility from start to finish.

Released by BIS, Symphony No. 8 is available on SACD and download.

---