Yet another important release from Phono Suecia has hit the stores in time for a hot Swedish summer with lots of vacation time to spend on balconies and porches and shores, and I’ve already tried out this CD on my balcony facing south-west, with ear-phones strapped across my head, sun hat and all, a cool fluid at hand.

Knut Sönstevold has meant a lot – and means a lot – to the contemporary listener, be he interested in the latest avant-garde or the semi-modern, more classical style of, say, Anders Eliasson or Daniel Börtz: all these examples readily available on this CD.

Sönstevold has played bassoon in symphony orchestras for thirty years, in the Danish Symphony Orchestra, Stockholm Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, he has performed chamber music in various settings too. An important part of his time he ahs spent as a soloist with different composers, like, for example, the famous modern music and electronic music composer Lars-Gunnar Bodin.

Knut Sönstevold has also been active as a composer, and at EMS – the electronic music studio in Stockholm – he composed a number of electroacoustic pieces in the 1970s.

After beginning his bassoon studies in Vienna, he continued at the renowned Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, with Werner Kaegi. Other important influences affected him at Sergiu Celibidache’s musical phenomenology courses.

Sönstevold upholds a position as a professor of bassoon playing at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm since 2000.

The first composition on this CD is Per Mårtensson’s Bassoon Concerto from 2002. Mårtensson – born 1967 – is well known for his interactive electronics and found objects. Those found objects – objets trouvés – may exist of any sounds we discover in our daily life.
In this composition Mårtensson has found twelve multiphonic chords.
Knut Sönstevold had approached Mårtensson to inquire if Mårtensson felt like writing a bassoon concerto, and he did.

It turned into a quite large concerto. The electronics serve to fatten the orchestral sound and extend the sounds of the bassoon. The sonic contraption comes with a pedal for the bassoon soloist, with which he can trigger various computer programs as well as connect a contact microphone straight into the computer. The sounds that are treated this a-way are then poured into the direct and natural sound of the orchestra, blending with it. Stockhausen used to go about things this way a long time ago, for example in the 60s and 70s, so it isn’t new, but quite effective – and things don’t have to be new, just useful.

The twelve multiphonic chords that were decided, have been spectrally analyzed by the composer. They are then used for the foundation of the music, which comes in four parts: introduction, part 1, solo cadenza, part 2.

The impression of the music is multilingual, you could say: coming across in various languages, like, for example, the language of emotions as well as the language of reasoning. The nervous and race-horse-hurried feeling is mixing with the intellectual reasoning of orchestra and soloist – or is it the soloist ducking under an orchestral wind that sometimes breaks up in flurries? No matter how you see it, the musical web is comfortably complex, reminding me of many a piece from the 1980s, before the new and very simple and minimal trend took over. Perhaps the disparate and thorny orchestra is engaged again, by the composers.
I like it this way, right here. Per Mårtensson has scribbled many things for the orchestra and Knut Sönstevold to sort out, and the process is interesting and enjoyable.

Master composer Anders Eliasson is next. I have always – since his beginnings – regarded him very highly, as someone who would never potter about or play the fool. He takes his art seriously, and I have never had any reason to disdain or disregard anything he’s done. Here he introduces a piece called Wellen, dedicated to Knut Sönstevold, but written for both bassoon and piano.

Wellen is, of course, Waves in German. It is a lively and preoccupied piece, leaning into an inner room of existence, even though you hear it loud and clear. The bassoon mumbles and talks, utters this and that, while the piano sometimes hammers off like an old-timer forming shapes out of copper plates.

Even though something is intense in here, peace is ruling. I don’t understand how that happens. It must have to do with some charm or incantation in the compositional process; i.e. within reach of Anders Eliasson. The music is wonderfully exciting, wringing itself out of my ears time and again, slithering out of my grip, spreading gold dust in spirals and serpentines about the distant horizon. Something to listen to many times!

The third composer is also well known in Sweden: André Chini. His piece is called Goélette de jade, and Chini conducts the Uppsala Chamber Orchestra.
André Chini is a very imaginative and quite lively fellow, who isn’t afraid to take his inspiration in his soul and write what ever comes to mind. This has resulted in a wonderful, glaring and reflecting music that can bring you out of a depression better than any chemical cure. Let Knut Sönstevold and the Uppsala Chamber Orchestra paint the land, and some kind of energy will fill your empty moments with hope.

Chini says that he, to begin with, was inspired by a replica of an old schooner in Venice. He says that the green color mirrored itself on the hull, glowing in a ghostly way – and in this feeling Chini began his composition. It’s impossible not to love an occurrence like this! Besides, the music – Sönstevold’s bassoon, especially – talks like a figure in a fairytale, stretching it’s long neck above the land, expressing himself in the most delicate and the most harsh way, and also in expressions of loving kindness, somehow persuading you that nothing is that hard, that bad: that life will find it’s resolution in the end – and the end is only a beginning! And – as indicated in the booklet – the music is PLAYFUL!

Daniel Börtz is the grand old master on this CD. His Concerto was written in 1978 – 79. Here it’s performed by Knut Sönstevold and the Swedish Wind Orchestra. It is wonderful how great and varying company Sönstevold and his bassoon get on this CD.
Sönstevold indicates that he hears both Ligeti and Sibelius in here – but of course, mostly Börtz, although well before he composed his violin, trumpet and piano concertos.
The bassoon concerto comes in one, sculptural movement.
The music in Daniel Börtz’s concerto is exciting, rising like a flock of sea gulls a times, only to fan out in into the relaxed skeletal bones of a fish of mighty waters, and then to shake it’s orchestral plume like tingling deep winter Christmas trees way out in to the northern lights of distant, northern lands.
Sönstevold treats his instrument much like a paintbrush in Börtz’s music, and I’m sure Börtz appreciates that. It’s good when two Maestros come together like this: Börtz and Sönstevold.

The last work is written by a considerably younger, but already very experienced, musician and composer and administrator: Ivo Nilsson. His work has the almost palpable title Diabas for bassoon and percussion, and it’s the most recent of all the recorded works, written in 2005. Jonny Axelsson plays bass zither here.
Various explanations are given for the title in the booklet, like a “gray-black kind of stone which was formed when magma was forced through the cracks of the earth”, while the title also refers to “the basic tone of the piece and the overtones that erupt like diabas”, but it also points to “dual elements” of the music.
Sure enough, the guys have a lot of fantasy, and there is nothing negative with that. It serves the description of the music, but I’m sure the music also speaks for it self, quite well!

Ivo Nilsson’s work has three parts. The soundworld of it is very original and catches your interest the second it starts. Metal and seeping sunlight, protruding horns from ancient times and new thoughts, rancid poetry and sleet prose! The plucking metal of the zither reminds me a little of an old oriental tune by Ingvar Karkoff, and the mumbling and also exulting bassoon even brings home a Peter Tchaikovsky catch, if you will. Let me tell you, the sounds of the bassoon aren’t all just plain. Sönstevold also delivers stagger and stumbling microtones and a host of impossible-to-account-for overtones. This diabas music is highly mineral, rock and gravel and all the material that is ground off and carried away by the relentless motion of water and gravity. This piece interests me. This whole CD interests me!