Various

Featuring: Lars Edlund, Olav Anton Thommesen, Jukka Tiensuu, Snorri Sigfús Birgisson, Ib Nørholm, Reiner Bredemeyer

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Insert included.

The Nordic Music Days - held biennially since 1888 and the oldest international music festival in the world dedicated to contemporary composition - assembled in Stockholm in 1978 a panorama of new music from across the Nordic countries, and this Caprice LP captures what the curators considered the most significant works from that edition. The composers present here define, between them, the range of the Nordic avant-garde at this moment: Lars Edlund (Sweden), Olav Anton Thommesen (Norway, born 1946), Jukka Tiensuu (Finland, born 1948), Snorri Sigfús Birgisson (Iceland), Ib Nørholm (Denmark, 1931-2019), and the East German Reiner Bredemeyer (1929-1995), whose inclusion signals the festival's ambition to reach beyond Scandinavian cultural boundaries.

Tiensuu and Thommesen represent a generation that had absorbed the full range of post-war European techniques and was beginning to find ways beyond them - Tiensuu's work already moving toward the dense, mercurial complexity that would characterize his mature output, Thommesen developing a spectral language of great lyrical force. Nørholm, by this point a major Danish voice, brings the gravitas of a fully formed style. Bredemeyer's presence - a composer whose DDR context gave his modernism a distinctly different ideological coloration - enriches the gathering with productive friction. An essential Caprice document. Caprice, CAP 3013.