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- Arne Nordheim
Nachruf (1975)
- Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)
Programme Note
Nachruf (1956/1975) the usual German title for a memorial piece or poem - literally 'calling after' - is a quintessentially Nordic piece, slender and spare, in which the afterschock of some deep feeling seems to be frozen and transfixed. In a different context, Nordheim has referred to 'the concept of what the poet (Salvatore Quasimodo) has called an "active pain", where landscapes and events float together and form images that you remember without really having experienced them'. In Nachruf there is but a single vision, momentarily prolonged, impossible of development. There is no drama, no argument, just the slow, constrained arches of melody rising and falling, emerging from nothing, subsiding into silence, like spent ripples dissolving in to the mirror of a still lake.
The piece is a mere forty-one bars long, scored only for strings, an early work dating from 1956 which Nordheim revised and published twenty years later. It is a model of economy and understatement, eschewing any hint of technical wizardry or display. But Nordheim is justifiably fond of it. Here is a telling distillation of his spiritual voice, and of his recurring preoccupation with loneliness, echo and annihilation.
- From the CD "Listen - the art of Arne Nordheim" ACD5070
The piece is a mere forty-one bars long, scored only for strings, an early work dating from 1956 which Nordheim revised and published twenty years later. It is a model of economy and understatement, eschewing any hint of technical wizardry or display. But Nordheim is justifiably fond of it. Here is a telling distillation of his spiritual voice, and of his recurring preoccupation with loneliness, echo and annihilation.
- From the CD "Listen - the art of Arne Nordheim" ACD5070
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