Live concerts of Magnus Lindberg’s music never fail to excite, as his predilection for large-scale works performed by enormous orchestral forces have the ability to overwhelm and inspire awe. However, assuming you listen to the entire 80 minutes of this program of four major works (all receiving their world premiere recordings), the near-continuous assault on the senses makes you wonder whether Lindberg has reached his limits with this form and should think about moving in a different direction. After all, even with music of such powerful dynamic contrasts, colorful orchestral texture, and striking percussive effects, monotony starts drifting in after a while and you become weary and exhausted. The shock value of incessant tritone chords is mitigated to the point that it sounds ordinary and no longer modern or original.
Of course, this is not to say that Lindberg is not an important composer with a nuanced ear and a cleverly executed method to treat harmony itself as a structural building block of his recent compositions. Cantigas, the first work on this disc, is a series of five cycles that fuses a basic harmonic premise centered on fifths with a mathematically derived set of steadily increasing and then slackening tempos. Throughout the piece, Lindberg constructs a whirlwind of sound, featuring visceral polyrhythmic brass blasts, multiple harmonic shifts, and a fiendishly difficult oboe solo.
The Cello Concerto, also a one-movement work, requires of its soloist superhuman dexterity and an ability to play cleanly in the very highest registers of the instrument. Cellist Anssi Karttunen will be a hard act to follow if this piece is ever recorded again, as he simply wrestles this monstrously thorny work into submission. This is not a typical concerto with the soloist always in the forefront: Lindberg purposefully tried to integrate the sound into the overall orchestral picture and he admits in the liner notes that he had to rewrite several sections to get it right. Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of Lindberg’s most devoted protagonists, affects a good balance between the soloist and the Philharmonia, which plays its heart out here and in the other three pieces.
The remaining works, Fresco and Parada, possess their own particular traits, although on the surface those don’t offer much more than other recent Lindberg creations. Again we hear the familiar fast skittish passages superimposed over tectonic harmonic movement, all dazzlingly played in sound that makes the most of Sony’s DSD recording technology. As all four pieces are rather long (more than 25 minutes for the Cello Concerto) and contain no “movement” breaks, it would be wise to listen to each work separately over a few days to both fully appreciate these compositions and avoid the onset of both tedium and aural numbness.
