This year’s World New Music Days was, not surprisingly, an excellent opportunity to experience that most rare and unknown quantity: Faroese contemporary music. i’ve already mentioned how a significant proportion of composers from the Faroe Islands based their work on extant musical ideas and materials, usually folk-related. However, this wasn’t always the case, and as i’ve previously described, one of the most engaging characteristics of Faroese music-making is the lack of conventional boundaries between different genres, demonstrating a unique form of stylistic fluidity.
An especially prominent exponent of this is Kristian Blak, whose genre-defying cycles composed for the group Yggdrasil i’ve already explored. It was also true of his Piano Concerto, the second movement of which we heard in a new arrangement by pianist Mattias Kapnas. Performed in the confines of the tiny art museum on the adjacent island of Sandoy, the original orchestral parts were reconfigured for a combination of synthesizers, electronics and percussion (performed by Jan Rúni Poulsen). The result was a fitting fusion, the piano coming from a classical perspective, the synths evoking prog rock, and the percussion adopting a folk attitude. The whole added up to something not unlike kosmische musik (particularly early Tangerine Dream), with a proto-ambient sensibility in which improvisatory and rhapsodic elements had the freedom to play out in an atmosphere where not so much anything could happen but whatever happened seemed right.
Music of an entirely different form emerged from Faroese trombone duo Andras Olsen and Dávur Juul Magnussen. Their piece Bládýpi [blue depth] had the amusing premise of “two trombones who want to be whales”. Their languorous music could hardly have been more evocative of this: a languorous dialogue, sometimes conversational, elsewhere talking over each other (which at these speeds was arguably inevitable; presumably real whales experience the same thing), at its most memorable uniting in a duet, rising up through the harmonic series of their instruments before closing in a hymn-like melody. Something comparable to that conclusion appeared in a semi-improvised open air performance by a quintet featuring Olsen and Magnussen alongside saxophonist Kristina Thede Johansen and trumpeters Johan Hentze and Ernst Remmel. It took place within a small gorge in the village of Gjógv (which means gorge), on the north-east coast of the island of Eysturoy. Initially dispersed around the gorge, they played to the rocks, the sea, the sky, sounding simultaneously elemental and poetic, declamatory and melodic. Thereafter, they became more chirpy and cheerful before refocusing on a lyrical duet between sax and trumpet. But it was the conclusion that proved most telling, the quartet reuniting in a warm, rather haunting hymnody, played outwards to the environment and then inward to one another, constantly embellished with loud cries from the gulls and terns soaring overhead.
In the nearby church at Funningur, melody materialised in an interesting way in guitarist Alvi Joensen‘s Paisaje faroese con niebla [Faroese landscape with fog], in which a double emergence took place. First, the music itself materialised out of little clouds of tremolo; second, having become less obscure and with growing traces of intricacy, a well known Faroese tune materialised, the theme finally emerging after its nebulous series of variations. Similar but more beguiling was Múrurin for string quartet by Eli Tausen á Lava. Performed by the Aldubáran String Quartet, lyricality here manifested from a soundscape that was static and dronal, not directly folk-like but allusive of it, such that it sounded less like a tangible idea than the memory of one. A very different soundworld permeated Viðljóð [echo], a work blending contrabass saxophone (performed by Kristina Thede Johansen) and electronics by Anna Katrin Ø. Egilstrøð. At first it was like something from the natural world, either literally (a creature or object) or akin to sonification of real-world data. Developing into a wailing vocal song regularly interrupted (or amplified?) by dirty flourishes from the sax, the electronics defocused into the noise of crashing waves, finally abandoning Johansen, holding a lovely sustained final note.
But perhaps the most exhilarating Faroese composition performed at WNMD was Kristian Blak‘s úr Holminum [from the Holm], an orchestral work not only inspired by the Faroes’ westernmost point, the islet Mykineshólmur, but literally shaped by it, using the contours of the landscape to derive and sculpt musical material. Performed by the Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds, it began as wild chaos, the players’ rushing and tumbling conveying exuberant elation. From this opening, úr Holminum passed seamlessly, yet at times disorientingly, through a cavalcade of episodes (a distinct Blak compositional fingerprint). A strange sustained music with harsh accents led to soft soloistic lyricism, the music practically slowing and fading to nothing, before playfully rediscovering rhythm and building not to a climax but – appropriately, considering the inspiration – to an extended, strong plateau, closing in an onslaught of metric hammer blows. Absolutely thrilling.
Many of this year’s WNMD concerts were recorded and are available to stream; to view specific pieces mentioned above, see below:
Kristian Blak – Piano Concerto [starts at 18:36]:
Alvi Joensen – Paisaje faroese con niebla [12:47]:
Kristian Blak – úr Holminum [37:24]:
