L'ange

Appreciation for the compositions from Scandinavian countries seems to be somewhat of an uphill battle. Apart from the works of Grieg and Nielsen, most other composers from this area of the globe are overlooked. This album of violin concertos by Norwegian composers Johan Svendsen and Peter Lange-Müller seeks to break this injustice. Svendsen's concerto makes clear that the composer was himself a violinist; the solo part is very idiomatically written, favoring lyricism over showiness. The orchestral accompaniment is sometimes overbearing and gets in the way of the solo violin's much more interesting and inspired contribution.

At the latest with the release of the albums "Zauberberg" and "Königsforst", in the mid-1990s, one associates GAS, Wolfgang Voigt's very own artistic cross-linking of the spirit of Romanticism and the forest as an artistic fantasy projection surface, with intoxicatingly blurred boundaries of post-ambient infatuation and the impenetrable thicket of abstract atonality. The distant, iconic straight bass drum marching through highly condensed, abstract sounds taken from classical music by the sampler or modulated accordingly, and the enraptured gaze through pop art glasses into the hypnotic thicket of an imaginary forest, manifested over the years this unique connection of audio and visual, which to understand fully, then as now, would be neither possible nor desirable.