Marianne Beate Kielland, Halvor Festervoll Melien & Nils Anders Mortensen – Kjell Habbestad: Songar om kjærleik (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:06 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
Songs Of Love is Mezzo-Soprano Marianna Beate Kielland’s 13th album at NativeDSD Music. On it she is joined by Baritone Halvor Festervoll Melien and Pianist Nils Anders Mortensen on this album from Lawo Classics.
Composer Kjell Habbestad says “Looking through my songs I discovered that most of them deal with love, often lost or unrequited love; yes, even with the same aspects that one finds in Edvard Munch’s central themes: love, angst and death.
With one exception, the songs in the album are arranged more or less chronologically according to the date of the source, from the Bible to poems by contemporary Norwegian poet Paal-Helge Haugen. Surprisingly, this sequence results in a dramaturgical movement from the love described in the Song of Songs, through the angst-filled life, to death.
In order that the album not end on a negative note, however, I have placed the poem by Olav H. Hauge after the Haugen oems. And there is one more coincidence: Almost without exception the chronological sequence coincides with the order in which the songs were composed”from “3 Canticles” in 1984 to “It is that Dream” in 2015.”
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Marianne Beate Kielland & Nils Anders Mortensen – Sigurd Lie: Songs, Vol. 2 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:09:02 minutes | 2,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
The songs on this release – volume 2 – continue the chronological list from volume 1.The album begins with the remarkably special cycle Wartburg, encompassing an enormous range of singing pathos. The text by Theodor Caspari has to do with Wartburg Castle, with its sweeping history. Martin Luther sought refuge there from May 1521 to March 1522. Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia resided there from 1211 to 1228, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited the castle several times, and, notably, the famous “minstrel contest” at the castle was an inspiration for Wagner when he composed his opera Tannhauser. So it is not so unusual that Theodor Caspari was also inspired by the castle’s history and reputation when he wrote his Wartburg texts.
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Marianne Beate Kielland, Nils Anders Mortensen – Sigurd Lie: Songs, Vol. 1 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:19:20 minutes | 2,77 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
It is an adventure to immerse oneself in the Norwegian treasury of song. There is so much magnificent music, and so much of it bears witness to the time in which it was written. Sigurd Lie was one of the eminent and gifted composers at the end of the nineteenth century. His body of work includes instrumental music and music for male choir and, above all, around 75 songs seldom performed after his death. The song texts were written by Norwegian poets, among them Vilhelm Krag, Sigbjørn Obstfelder and Per Sivle. This is the first of two releases in which Kielland and Mortensen illuminate all the songs and let them shine.
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Marianne Beate Kielland, Nils Anders Mortensen – The New Song (2016)
DSF Stereo DSD128, 1 bit/5,6 MHz | Time – 53:18 minutes | 4,22 GB | Genre: Classical, Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Booklet, Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
We know many of them — the German Lied, the French chanson, the Scandinavian song — works for voice and piano. Countless such musical pieces have been written throughout history, mainly from Mozart’s time on. But after a couple of hundred years, this form of composition fell “out of fashion”, and composers often used other ways to accompany singers.
How do we think of classical song today? I challenged three composers to each write his “Lied”, a piece of music for voice and piano, and received three remarkably different results. Two hundred years ago, the format was predictable; today, boundaries have dissolved, and the composer turns out whatever the heart desires. What these composers write about their own works appears later on.
In addition, we wished to include five wonderfully distinctive songs of Edvard Hagerup Bull — a composer of our own time, but one who was and remained controversial, and, as such, was essentially deprived of recognition and fame in Norway. Edvard Hagerup Bull was a grandnephew of Edvard Grieg, he studied with Messiaen and Milhaud, among others, and he lived a large part of his life in Paris.
Many are familiar with the short aphoristic poems of Piet Hein known as “grooks” — artful, thought-provoking texts with their unconventional way of looking at life. Coupled with Hagerup Bull’s playful, humoristic music, they become musical gems deserving of attention and performance. We are pleased to have these songs on the recording! To be on the safe side, I wish to point out that the “grooks” are written in Danish, but I have chosen to sing the texts with Norwegian pronunciation. –Marianne Beate Kielland
Nils Anders Mortensen – J.S. Bach: Partitas Nos. 1, 5 & 6 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:14:32 minutes | 2,51 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Lawo Classics
Bach composed ten partitas – three for solo violin, one for solo flute and six for keyboard. As the term partita may mean, to quote from the Oxford Composer Companion to Bach, “a suite of dances or a set of variations” – it is no more precise than many other musical terms. If there is no obvious difference between the partita and the suite, there seems to be no justification for two separate terms. In the sixteenth century partita indicated one of a sequence of variations, but this meaning evolved, coming to signify a collection of movements and later – by the time of Bach’s keyboard partitas – a suite of dances.
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