The instigator of this work may be modern political conflict, but I will not get to hung up on that, because I don’t really sense this precursor all that much. The beginning of these loudly expressive orchestral fireworks comes across more on the proudly jubilant side. I think this music is cinematic, perfectly suited for some great, large-scale movie, like, say, Spartacus or some other million dollar bash with thousands of extras and horses, lances and flags and trumpets and blood coloring the soil; panoramic Technicolor views!
Ah, the timpani are applied with precision and rhythmic excellence!
Apart from that, I hear an orchestral coloring that has some properties in common with Allan Pettersson for a while; those sharp, shrill motions high up in the wall of sound, and certain marching-up sonorities, blaring trumpets and rhomboids of strings passing hither and thither in the richness and density of sound, like groups of spears above the mass of soldiers.
I think Benjamin Staern has picked up on some of the most viable strands of contemporary and semi-contemporary (1940s, 1950s, 1960s) Swedish orchestral music (Bengt Hambraeus, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Allan Pettersson) and made those inherent characteristics his own by filtering them through his burlesque and also sensitive and inward personality, flashing his energy in bolts of lightning all across the score!
At some places Staern has indicated some more contemporary performance practices, where wheezing blowing sounds are heard as the valves are clicking in a fingertip dance inside a sudden whirlwind of built-up momentum.
Massive, percussive sections are relieved by elastic string strokes, while fairytale gestures in the woodwinds are contrasted by shots of vitalizing brass statements and swaying submarine seaweed string sections: a music talking in all directions, like a teenager coming across intensely in the midst of a gang of friends on a Friday night small-town street corner in a contemporary West Side Story setting. A lot is said, many feelings flow back and forth in that peculiar exchange of energy that quantum theory describes as particles switching on and off all the time between a state of pure energy and a state of matter, flickering, flickering… but in Staern’s Threat of War there are moments of reflection and consideration too, when the orchestral color hovers in a nuance of dark violet, and light shimmers in a minimal vibration just above the horizon, like that hour before dawn when night still has the grip, but a rustling of an awakening breeze is just about to stir the air and draw ripples that spread like cracks in glass across the water of the bay…
…and at 3:00 and a while further I greet Tchaikovsky!
