Frode Haltli, Vertavo String Quartet

Looking on Darkness is the first solo album by the Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli, released by ECM New Series in November 2002. It brings together five works of Nordic new music for the accordion, by composers from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, and four of them are premiere recordings of pieces written for Haltli. Taken as a whole, the programme treats the accordion as a fully fledged concert instrument, able to move from near silence to massive, organ-like clusters and dry percussive clicks.

Haltli was born in Levanger in 1975 and studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, then in the soloist class of the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. Before this disc he had appeared on ECM alongside saxophonist Trygve Seim, but his main commitment was to contemporary composition. The album was recorded in August 2001 at Sofienberg Kirke in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. For one work Haltli is joined by the Vertavo String Quartet, and its composer, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, supervised the editing.

The sequence is shaped like a concert. Bent Sørensen's title piece opens it in an introverted, half-lit mood that Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews heard as a study in decay. PerMagnus Lindborg's Bombastic SonoSofisms and Magnus Lindberg's Jeux d'anches are brisker and more virtuosic, full of angular leaps and fragmented figures. At the centre stands Ratkje's gagaku variations, at more than 23 minutes the longest work. A trip to Japan prompted it, and it sets the accordion's long, sinuous lines against brief string pizzicati, moving between fragility and rougher, more aggressive textures. Asbjørn Schaathun's Lament closes the disc and ranges from growling low notes to piercing high ones.

The album won the Norwegian Spellemannprisen for contemporary music in 2002. In BBC Music Magazine Hilary Finch wrote that it presents "five challenging new works which explore the furthest sonic regions of the instrument". She heard in the gagaku variations an "unpredictable and revelatory effect" from accordion and quartet. In the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang, Astrid Kvalbein called it "a fearless, searching and exceptional debut".

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1794, first released in 2002.