Lars Ekström (1956) is an amiable person and composer in that he doesn’t maintain any cheap self-evidence. He has no pure and fundamentalistic musical answers, but many questions, dispersed throughout his art. In other words, he is an intellectual person with philosophical, yes, even mythical, inclinations. He is a barefoot dreamer and a meticulous surgeon, and his art is shaped accordingly.
His music reveals a strong spiritual awareness, and a relentless… curiosity! He utilizes his whole palette, from computers to the simple pen, and he lets his imagination and his furious – but orderly channeled – creativity flow through all his artisan means.

I’m sure the characteristics described above stem from within Lars Ekström himself, and from his karmic tour of lives, but maybe some good influences have affected him too, from some of his teachers, like Sven-David Sandström, Daniel Börtz, Pär Lindgren and Franco Donatoni, and I believe I hear more than occasional similarities with the atmospheres of Finnish wonder composer Kaija Saariaho here and there too...
Ekström (currently a lecturer of composition and instrumentation at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm and deputy principal director at The Edsberg Music Institute) is well oriented in many idioms, composing works in the veins of chamber music, orchestral music, opera, string quartets, solo works, electroacoustic music and so forth. His passion for Strindberg – obvious in the last pieces on this CD – reveals Ekström’s interest in other disciplines than pure music too, like literature and painting.

An obvious insight in psychological and spiritual dimensions can be detected from just looking at the subtitle of the first piece, moreover the title of the CD itself; “The Dream Age”, which hints at the Australian Aborigines and their spiritual awareness of a dream age, a mythical state beyond time where everything and everyone become part of a higher entity, or where their true nature as being a part of a higher entity is made clear to the trekkers of the dream tracks; the songlines. (Bruce Chatwin wrote a very interesting book dealing with this, called “The Songlines”; ISBN 0-14-009429-6, which was recommended to me by a young German woman when we became acquainted during our own dream-trek through the valleys of Northern Lapland, through the deserts of rock below the glaciers a couple of years ago…)

“Rondo for Piano & Orchestra; The Dream Age” features Niklas Sivelöv as a pianistic hero, no less. The piece commences in a throng of orchestral unrest, into which the piano, peculiarly double-visioned, introduces long, winding poems, like prayer beads or garlands of human urgency.
Deep, rumbling exclamations from inside the orchestra hammers thick poles way down into the clay, anchoring the landslide fluency of the spiraling, wobbling piano line.
Somewhere deep inside this translucent sound web I find a greeting from Tchaikovsky, in an accent of the string section; in a certain attitude of the timbres, opening up a glimpse of a classical St. Petersburg atmosphere… and Rachmaninov also passes like a shadowy figure in the pianistic merger with the orchestra, giving off a faint scent, a tonal fragrance of romanticism.
The clarity of the sound is diamond-edged, star-sparkling, winter night-tinkling… as the northern hemisphere rotates in a heavy Earthen gesture around the Polar Star.

“Spröda schakt” (“Brittle Shafts”) is a soloistic percussion piece, performed by renowned Markus Leoson.
It opens in ominous, apprehensive shades of light, as if subdued by the shadow of a cloud passing across the rock desert of the valley below the Nallo peak of Northern Lapland, under threatening glaciers.
Visions of a dark age to come rise out of the percussion, in nuances of hopelessness for the human situation, harboring so much intelligence without wisdom… but with a glowing golden rim of stubborn beauty around the percussive attacks…
Somehow this music turns into a conversational bit – but a conversation one only conducts with oneself, in passing cloud shadows below the glaciers…
The percussion is falling out like precipitation, like abrasive sleet, like icy drops from the heavens, later getting much more violent, with bass drum and high-hat envisioning mental thunder and emotional havoc… oozing out, though, in Eastern insights, Eastern rests, wherein Silence is lauded as the mother of all sounds…

“Garden of Ice” really does introduce the feeling of icicles, magic winter birds of the mind, and reflecting armor of icefalls down the steep sides of rocks on either side of the road; ice that flows in complete immobility, like a nature’s snapshot of a wild and dangerous occurrence, frozen like the “Sanctus, Sanctus” of Gaudi’s architecture of Barcelona…
Showers of prismed light disperse in every direction, like ricochets of a wild shootout in the days of the wildest west… and it’s like getting blinded by the sudden ray of light through the sighting-notch at Stonehenge.
Brittle, miniature sounds out of the chamber ensemble paint the contours of wavy figures and pointillist spurts, and what you hear sounds like bells of good thoughts hanging from the fir trees in dark midnight forests of the soul, where the unconscious absorbs and grinds all our experiences, hopes, dreams – our karmic load…
“Garden of Ice” is a thoughtful, reflecting piece of chamber art, in a slow but relentless motion ahead, at times more weighty and gravitational, at other times soaring, suspended, airy – in a chamber dance of utmost elegance through a mental landscape of frost and snow and stars gleaming above the jagged Scandinavian fir horizon…

Suite from “Genom skärvan av en prisma” (“Through the Fragment of a Prism”) concludes this Ekström CD. The suite consists of four different sections, each taking off from a painting by August Strindberg. The whole work really consists of eight sections. The parts here also owe their names to the Strindberg paintings that they are inspired by: “Kustlandskap II” (“Coastal Landscape II”), “Oväder” (“Storm”), “Underlandet” (“Wonderland”) and “Den ensamma tisteln” (The Lone Thistle”). In part this music is truly programmatic, as in “Kustlandskap II” and ”), “Oväder”, where this is obvious, but also in the other two parts, though they are more directly inwardly oriented.

“Kustlandskap II” wells in a repeated rhythm like the dunes of the ocean against an autumn shoreline of rocks and sand, while high pitches tingle like grains of sand between your teeth.
“Oväder” opens in a dramatic, Sibelian tour-de-force, displaying nature in a havoc, danger up ahead; a forceful wind-section and an upset group of strings huddling away behind a cliff, talking madly amongst themselves. Tremendous timpani underscore the severity of the situation.
“Underlandet” lands you in a magic meadow, a place of enchantment, fairies tingling and hovering, elves in green Robin Hood garments barely visible against the green of the moss of the ice age rocks, ravens, fairytale birds with voices like chimneys and wings like mist…
“Den ensamma tisteln” introduces an impressionistic atmosphere of “Pavane pour une infante défunte”, but the object here is a lonely thistle… and I am reminded of the thistle I used to great (loudly) every day as I biked by it on my exercise round along a forest road last summer… and surely Strindberg, too, saw “a heaven in a wildflower and a world in a grain of sand”, as does Lars Ekström in this highly sophisticated and downright beautiful music, wonderfully performed by all the musicians.