Abrahamsen: Schnee

Nominee in the Contemporary category

Andrew Mellor

Coup de cœur

Recommended

“A compelling performance of this strange and haunting work.”

Editor’s Choice – Orchestral Section

“…The music is as demure as its creator, and ideal performances capture that same quality. This one does. The sounds Abrahamsen craves, white and translucent across a large range of actual expression, hugely complex on the page but delectably simple to the ear, are exceptionally realised and recorded here…”

“… The musicians – in this case members of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra – are divided by a central percussionist into two groups. Both have a piano, but one is dominated by strings, the other by winds. Throughout, they are not so cleanly divided, combining in different ways. If all this sounds like an intellectual exercise, fear not: it is anything but. Veering between minimalism and modernism, Schnee is a multi-faceted portrait of snow in sound, often as haunting, stark and strangely comforting as parts of Schubert’s Winterreise. It is performed here with the requisite precision – and an abundance of fantasy.” ****

Pizzicato Supersonic

“… This work, with nine soloists, shows a largely crystalline crisp nature that only rarely swirls into a denser structure without becoming opaque because of it. The musicians of the chamber orchestra from Lapland, perhaps because they know such natural phenomena from their own experience, know how to treat these different types of snow in an exemplary manner and to let the music, which is as fragile as it is sharp-edged, trickle and tumble to the ear, so that images of snow crystals can form before the inner eye as an additional imagination. A very entertaining hour of finely chiselled tones, constantly teasing the ear but rarely annoying, is the result of this intense clarification of the composer’s intentions.”