Guy S Rickards from Gramophone

About Sun Song

Every so often a composer appears with music refreshingly other, as in the 1960s with Ligeti, Penderecki or Reich, and more recently Saariaho. Karin Rehnqvist (b. 1957) is another such, whose music requires one to discard preconceptions of what constitutes Western art music.

Here is music simultaneously radically new and very old. It could only have been written at the end of this century, but its well-springs lies in immemorial folk traditions unconnected to the concert hall. The singers in her extraordinary cycle Timpanum Songs – Herding Calls (1989) sing, whisper, keen, shriek, wail and grunt, to a text in places openly misogynist (feminist issues are an abiding concern of hers).

If it sounds on paper like avant-garderie gone mad, in performance the effect is controlled and compelling, like the product of some quite alien musical culture. Yet the extremeity of means lies largely in ancient rural Swedish traditions, such as kulning, used by women goat- and cowherds to call their flocks. My first encounter with this peice left me numbed for days.

The marvellous five-part cycle Sun Song (1994) is if anything more powerful, a hymn to the sun drawing mainly on the Icelandic poem Sólarljóth. Rehnqvist’s restraint and delicacy is evident from the cycle’s Final song. ’Another day departs’, and the beautiful motet When you but walk on the ground (1995). These reissued performances (the Phono Suecia disc contains three orchestral pieces translating Rehnqvist’s manner into non-vocal media) are stunning, in exemplary BIS transfers. Rehnqvist’s music may seem discordant (though not on it own terms), alien at times uncomfortable, but is never less than absorbing. Love it or loathe it, you will not easily forget it.

Very, very strongly recommmended.
 

[ BIS CD 996 and Phono Suecia PSCD 85 ]