Sten Melin (1957) is a composer of many genres, which this CD plainly shows – and the amassment of skilled artists collected here is amazing. He’s really got it together this time!

Melin comes from northern Sweden, and maybe that has at least something to do with the refined wilderness of this wildman! We Swedes all like the Norrland dialect, and there is a special dialect here, in these pieces, intellectually and musically, compositionally, emotionally.

After a colorful youth he studied privately with renowned composer Sven-David Sandström. He traveled the long way from Haparanda to Stockholm once a month to study with Sandström, which must have made these lectures something really special, considering the long hours (a night and half a day) on the train back and forth from Haparanda. Surely the passing landscape rubbed off on the lectures, and surely the lectures rubbed of on the passing landscape. These are interesting thoughts, which probably could be developed much further in another setting. How about that, Mr. Melin? Later, at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Melin studied composition with professor Gunnar Bucht, and interestingly, electroacoustic composition with Pär Lindgren, a very interesting composer who has released a number of revolutionary electronic pieces, such as “Houdinism”, “Rummet” (“The Room”) and “Det andra rummet” (“The Other Room”), dealing with the spatial aspect of music and layered events taking place behind each other in a surprisingly effectual soundweb. If Lindgren had any effect on Melin, it could only have been for good. Gunnar Bucht introduced his pupil to Brian Ferneyhough, and Ferneyhough had a lot of influence on Melin, through his brilliant intellect and his ability to have many events going on at the same time, in an intricate system of sparkling restrain, thereby building a forceful tension, to be released in sudden jackknife erratics in the orchestra or ensemble.

The CD starts of with Fredrik Ullén at the piano, rushing on in a Nancarrow guise, and the piece is called “Ce n’est pas possible” (“It isn’t possible”). It’s a miniature, just 1:27, but a good start.
Track 2 breaks the mood completely as a string quartet with some of the foremost players in Scandinavia, yeah, Europe, hits the stage. Amongst them is my favorite violinist, Anna Lindal, who has shown many times that she is of the right stuff! Especially impressive is her unofficial recording of Claude Loyola Allgén's “Sonata for Solo Violin” – a long, quirky peace, really distressing the player who tries it! Lindal swept through it like an angel soaring over a bombed out Dresden. Here she engages in the string quartet “Q is Q” by Melin, once premiered by the Arditti String Quartet! It’s a typical modern string quartet, at first sounding like something from Estonia or thereabouts (Osvaldas Balakauskas, for example), but soon getting into a much more avant-garde type of atmosphere, with whining and staccatos overpowering you.

A number of pieces follow, like “Två sånger” (Two Songs”) with famous opera singer Olle Persson and well-known Swedish pianist of a younger generation; Henrik Löwenmark. A saxophone quartet with The Stockholm Saxophone Quartet livens things up with humorous variations on a well-known traditional Swedish song; “Källarbacksvariationer” (The Cellar Slope Variations”).
The piccolo trumpet of track 6 is sharp and tender, and cuts through the air like a samurai sword, in perfectly sliced motions. The track is called “Sonora”.

On track 8, “nänns” for string trio, Anna Lindal returns with her divine violin, joined by equally gifted Chrichan Larson on cello and Pascal Siffert on viola. The booklet says about this piece: “Like the scent of last year’s lingonberries thawing in the spring sunlight”, and it cannot be better said. A wonderful and sensitive piece for connoisseurs of sound and light, for citizens of the world and the hinterworld, for men and women with wild thoughts, and for those who have caught a glimpse of the little people in the forest, and who fear being sucked into the mountain, but at the same time lust for it.

The last track – no. 10 – imitates the famous Ketjak – the Ramayana Monkey Chant from Bali.

That said, it is well understood that Sten Melin has many strings on his lyre. It is enlightening to experience a spirit with this wide cultural spectrum. The CD is a success!