Arnesen

Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen’s Holy Spirit Mass is released by Decca Classics for Easter, his first full-length recording on the label. Sofi Jeannin conducts the Trondheim Vocal Ensemble and Trondheim Soloists on the recording, out on 2 April.The premiere recording of Kim André Arnesen’s Holy Spirit Mass is released by Decca Classics on Good Friday, 2 April 2021. Arnesen’s works have crossed oceans and continents, with “rapturous” (New York Times) performances for the likes of former President Barack Obama. Already one of the world’s most performed living composers, his scores have become mainstays of both amateur and professional choral repertoire.

Rising star Kim André Arnesen is already one of the most performed living choral composers in the world. His music is rooted in his home of Trondheim, Norway, but has been performed all over the world, including for former President Barack Obama at The White House, and The Vatican

«Pentagon Tapes»? Stay calm! The title makes no reference to secret surveillance or lethal covert operations inside the most secretive building on the planet. This Pentagon is the Pentagon room in the abundantly fine art-supplied Reksten Collections Building in Bergen, Norway. Blessed with nice acoustics and equipped with a Steinway Grand, the Pentagon room became the recording studio where pianist Dag Arnesen, bassist Ole Marius Sandberg and drummer Ivar Thormodsæter laid down the tracks for this album in September 2016. For Dag Arnesen (b. 1950), «Pentagon Tapes» represents a welcome return to playing jazz within the modern, American-originated idiom that he has mastered so well ever since his breakthrough on the Norwegian jazz scene in the mid-70s. Not that he ever completely abandoned it, but for several years, his highly successful «Norwegian Song» concept kept him very busy interpreting folk songs and the folk-inspired music of Edvard Grieg, Geirr Tveitt and a few other composers into his own musical language.

Dag Arnesen’s musical journey began with classical piano training, drawing inspiration from beautiful Bergen’s own legacy in music, particularly through composer/pianists like Edvard Grieg.

Arnesen Blues Band is basically a quintet. Bass, drums, piano, organ and myself on guitar and vocal. Sometimes, when space or finance is short, we do gigs as a quartet. The combination piano/organ gives you a big sound, more soloists and the possibility to arrange music towards different directions such as jazz, touch of gospel, rock, big band-feel, in order to vary the realms of blues music.

It is not uncommon in improvisational music to see the melody primarily as a point of departure for musicians’ solos. But obviously, melodies have a power of their own. Playing a melody, letting it shine in its own right, takes skills. These skills are featured on this album.

Kim Andre Arnesen is one of Norway’s most frequently performed contemporary composers. International recognition of his music includes a performance of the beautifully evocative Cradle Hymn at the White House for Barack Obama in 2016. Arnesen’s association with Denver’s Kantorei resulted in their commissioning the warmly expressive ‘The gift I’ll leave you’ and the eloquent ‘Making or Breaking.’ ‘Even when He Is Silent’ sets a text written by a prisoner on a concentration camp wall, and Arnesen’s own summing-up of ‘Flight Song’ is that “music making is the song of new life, fragile as the fall of a feather.”

From the time the first tracks were laid in the early nineteenth century, the railroad has occupied a crucial place in America's historical imagination. Now, for the first time, Eric Arnesen gives us an untold piece of that vital American institution—the story of African Americans on the railroad.

Commissioned work by Ketil Bjørnstad based on the poem "The Cemetery by the Sea" by Paul Valéry. With Ketil Bjørnstad, Solveig Andsnes, Nils Økland and Rune Arnesen.