Pentatone

When I heard Hegge's previous album, "Feeling", for the first time, I was wildly excited. There was something about the immediacy and the squeak-free playing with built-in resistance and thick nerves. Here at Berget, we are spoiled for bands that make a celebration of jazz history and make it sound fresh. Hegge is among the best in the area, and playfulness is one of the qualities managed. The quintet on "Beyond Your Wildest Streams" is the same as on "Feeling" from 2020: Jonas Kullhammar on tenor saxophone, Martin Myhre Olsen on soprano and alto saxophone, Vigleik Storaas on piano, Håkon Mjåset Johansen on drums and cymbals and Bjørn Marius Hegge on bass. The latter has also composed the songs.

Pentatone presents a new album full of world-premiere recordings of orchestral songs by Hans Sommer, sung by an excellent quartet of soloists – Mojca Erdmann, Anke Vondung, Mauro Peter and Benjamin Appl – together with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the baton of Guillermo García Calvo. Sommer was a Liszt student whose operas were performed and praised by Richard Strauss, but sunk into relative oblivion due to his unusual career path and independence from major publishers. The songs were discovered recently and can finally be presented to the world. Focusing mostly on Goethe poetry, combining high Romanticism with folk styles, Sommer’s songs are colourfully orchestrated, harmonically audacious, and often highly dramatic and evocative.