On Monday evening, the Oslo Chamber Music Festival presented the results of a Nordic “Call for Scores” with four compositions by four young composers. Under the heading “New Tones and Modern Classics”, these pieces were, somewhat puzzlingly, bookended by chamber arrangements of tone poems by Richard Strauss. Even though the combination of new and older music can be an interesting and enlightening one, this programme lacked cohesion and proved confounding.
The first of the new pieces was Sandrose by Ansgar Beste. Sandrose is the German word for desert rose, and the piece was in many ways a depiction of the formation of this crystalline structure. The composer is very much concerned with the use of extended playing techniques, and the four players – a pianist, clarinettist, violist, and a percussionist – made great use of these techniques, be they dragging a comb over the viola strings or blowing through the clarinet without a mouthpiece.
Rather less concerned with pitch, Sandrose focused instead on the percussive qualities of each instrument, creating an extremely complex polyrhythmic texture. While this layering of sounds is an interesting idea, I found the execution lacking. There was little obvious development, with similar complex rhythmic figures continuing throughout without much variation or contrast, and as a result, I found it difficult to maintain my engagement in the piece.
Phorisms, Book II by Jonas Skaarud followed. Phorisms consists of 27 miniatures for string quartet, tiny pieces lasting only a few seconds each. In his introduction to the work, Skaarud talked about his fascination for the incomplete and interrupted and indeed, these little miniatures were not stand-alone pieces, yet together they almost managed to constitute a cohesive whole. The miniatures ranged from simple chords to chaotic contrapuntal lines for different combinations of instruments within the string quartet. While the sonorities were at times very beautiful, I would have liked Skaarud to have developed these ideas a little further, as the miniatures simply felt all too brief.
Jan Martin Smørdal’s less-sense, a piece taking its inspiration from the life of Saint Augustine, has a constant focus on self-denial and self-correction. The piece for piano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and soprano, focused on an ever more frantic repetition of melodic fragments. Throughout, the musicians were seen scribbling furiously in the music, a form of self-correction, negating what they as performers and the composer wished to be played in favour of the wishes of some presumably higher being. The six musicians were very much an ensemble, with no single musician taking on a definite solo role. The singer played a mostly textural role, with the text often being obscured either by other instruments or by its actual delivery; she would often gasp the words, or sing them very high and softly in long, drawn-out phrases. I found this piece very exciting, although I felt it perhaps relied a little too much on theatrics. The constant scribbling in the music by the musicians, and especially the occasional panting from the soprano, often reduced the impact of the work instead of adding anything to it.