Geirr Tveitt

* Variations on a Folksong from Hardanger for 2 pianos and orchestra
* Piano Concerto No. 4 "Aurora Borealis"*

Havard Gimse, piano*; Gunilla Suessmann, piano; Royal Scottish National
Orchestra/Bjarte Engeset
Naxos 8.555761 {DDD} TT: 60:51

Summary for the Busy Executive: Their bright and glittering eyes.

Music poured from modern Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt like a flood.
About 80% of his output went up in a house fire (Norwegian houses are
built mostly out of wood).  Of his six piano concertos, two have completely
disappeared and probably won't ever be recovered.  A major composition
turned up literally in a bag of trash Tveitt had forgotten to dump.
Tveitt's hanging over oblivion's abyss by a toenail.  His music, like
his great forerunner Grieg's, is noteworthy more for its melodic and
harmonic invention than for its formal construction.  That is, although
the music yields rewards to analysis, that's not really what strikes you
about it.  Certainly, both pieces here move in straightforward ways.

The Variations (1939) are (of course) variations (somewhere around thirty
of them), with no attempt to build a quasi-symphonic movement as in the
Brahms Haydn-Variationen.  The theme sounds clearly in the bass clarinet
at the outset, and the composer takes off from there.  Turns of melody
characteristic of Grieg will catch the ear of the alert Grieg aficionado,
which probably means that Hardanger folk music inspired both composers.
Although Tveitt devotes a lot of care to transitions between one variation
and the next, throughout it's the individual variation which holds the
listener's attention, rather than a gradually-unfolding argument.
Furthermore, no variation strays far from the theme.  That Tveitt commands
the listener's interest over a 30-minute span testifies to his powers
of invention.  For example, in the third variation, the composer gets
the theme going simultaneously at "regular" tempo and twice as slow.
Furthermore, the ideas of one variation often pop up in another, so much
so that I began to wonder if the piece were somehow palindromic (conclusion:
not according to me).  The liner notes talk of Tveitt's "intricate"
planning, but I doubt it.  Other works show him capable of it, but here
I think the method more dynamically "associative" than consciously worked
out.  The idiom straddles late Romanticism and early Modernism.  In that
way, it reminds me a lot of the Rachmaninov of the Symphonic Dances and
the Paganini Rhapsody.  If you have no problems with those works, this
one will go down easy.  It's a big ol' Romantic blow-out of a piece.

The fourth piano concerto, composed ten years later, is a different
kettle of fish -- more obviously Modern (with a capital M), more formally
distinct, although the Romantic impulse behind the music remains.  Tveitt
apparently loved watching the stars.  From his home, he could actually
see the aurora borealis and dragged mattresses outside so he and his
kids could lie on their backs and gaze at the sky.  His infatuation
resulted in a masterpiece, formally intricate and poetic as well.

The concerto consists of the standard three movements, though not in
a standard order.  The first movement, subtitled "The Northern Lights
awakening above the autumn colors," begins slowly and quietly with an
"awakening" downward pentatonic run.  In short order, two main thematic
cells appear, and these generate most of the matter of a modified sonata
movement.  Tveitt concerns himself mostly with continual variation and
fragmentation of these basic ideas, so much so that he really seems to
be working with intervals (minor thirds and major and minor seconds)
rather than with even cells as such.  The piano has a mainly heroic part,
and the music shows mainly a hard, glittery edge.  The second movement,
"Glittering in the winter heavens, and ...," a modified scherzo, again
opens with a pentatonic theme.  Indeed, a pentatonic scale generates
most of the themes of the first part of the movement.  Gradually, however,
the scales fill in, and more and more chromatic twists and turns show
up.  The minor thirds and major and minor seconds have more and more to
say about thematic content.  Tveitt wrote the solo part for himself, one
of the great virtuosi of his time.  The movement expresses "glittering"
and fleetness.  "Fading away in the bright night of spring," the finale,
is -- unusually -- a slow movement which begins with an extremely long
tune starting from a beautiful, shimmering major-seventh chord.  Indeed,
it's one long tune after another, but the general thematic shapes from
the previous movements show up here as well.  There's a wonderful,
nocturnal horn melody made up of perfect fourth intervals which manages
to avoid sounding Hindemithian and comes across as the instrument singing
beautifully.  The movement ends with major-seventh harmonies that began
it.

It's awfully hard for me to say how the performers do, if I consider
what an ideal performance might be like.  It's certainly a good,
professional, straight-ahead job.  However, consider that this is the
only recording.  Who knows what Zimerman and the Berlin Philharmonic
could do with it (not that it's likely to happen in my lifetime)?
Meanwhile, Gimse and Engeset convey the stature of both pieces and make
a case for Tveitt as an important twentieth-century voice.  If you like
Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, odds are you'll like Tveitt, and Naxos as
usual makes it easy to experiment.

Steve Schwartz