Lars Gunnar Lars Gunnar Bodin

Bendik Hofseth is a Norwegian jazz musician, who plays the saxophone and sings. He is also a bandleader, and arranges and composes music. When Bendik Hofseth went to New York in 1987, and replaced the world famous saxophonist Michael Brecker in the band Steps Ahead, it probably came as a surprise to many. A youngster from Lørenskog, Norway in the jazz capital of New York, lining up for one of the most renowned jazz bands in US. Along with Steps Ahead, he has toured world wide several times since 1987.

Medtner's music fascinates and surprises, in the midst of what also seems to be well known. You may imagine that you have heard the melodies before, in childhood or in a dream. But, even if you haven’t, it is as if you have been waiting for this music to return. In some mysterious way, it evokes the memory of the unheard. He named many of his piano pieces SKAZKA – tale. Some of them carry subtitles, but it is uncertain whether the composer had specific narratives in mind, as the name would suggest. The influential Soviet musicologists Boris Asafyev may have been right when he claimed that "these are not descriptive tales or tales that illustrate an event. These are tales of personal experiences – of conflicts in the inner life of man". In this recording, Gunnar Sama plays five of Medtner's albums, composed over the course of some 30 years.

Gunnar de Frumerie grew up in a musical family. His mother was a skilled pianist who gave him his first piano lessons, and his father was an architect with a great and lively interest in music. Gunnar’s siblings and later several other family members also became good musicians. He himself appeared early as a pianist and started composing early on. At the age of nineteen, he won all three prizes in a com- position competition organized by the Hirsch piano store in 1927. He had submitted four piano pieces but only written the manuscript to one of the pieces himself; the others were written by his mother, father, and sister, so that the hand-writing would not reveal the author. The jury found all the pieces equally good. The surprise was therefore great when it was discovered that they had the same author. Unofficially, it was said that if there had been a fourth prize, he would have received it as well. It is music written by a young man who was still a student at the Royal Academy of Music. He made his public debut as a pianist in January 1929, playing, among other things, his own works in the main hall of the Music Academy.