Phono Suecia continues its Con forza series, focusing on one instrumentalist at a time. Usually you’ll hear the main instrument and various sub-instruments of it, or perhaps just variations of the instrument. In this case, of course, we’re living in the clarinet family.

Staffan Mårtensson says that it is important for him to co-operate with the composer of the work that he will play, and seek out untrodden paths, new means and methods. This is especially true for new music, which often applies new techniques. Mårtensson has played all kinds of clarinet works, from the old, traditional ones by Mozart and Brahms to Stockhausen, but he says that Johan Forssell’s concert, which he plays here, is the most demanding he’s explored. One example I that he has to utilize circular breathing during low pitches, which is physically exhausting. Another example [which I find boring – sounds like elite gymnastics -, but which maybe works here: I haven’t listened yet!] is that Forssell takes the instrument up to higher pitches and down to lower pitches than any other composer.

As I begin to listen to part 1 of Jonas Forssell’s work – The Kingdom of Minerals from In the Beginning; Concerto for basset clarinet and orchestra – I feel sleepy after a long October exercise bike ride on my racing bike, and drift into a state just above sleep, soaring in a lucid state inside the music, and the atmosphere of the sound world takes me over, brings me in, just as clearly as was I brought into the Unna Reaiddávággi Valley on my way to the Unna Raita hut. It has happened to me before, that I get accustomed in a deeper and subconscious way to a piece of music in this drifting mind-state, in a weightless soaring just above the sea of sleep. It’s magic, and in this case of Jonas Forssell’s In The Beginning, it was perhaps exactly what I needed to get in phase with the atmosphere, the sounds, the fairytale environments of the music, to turn completely Mind and Spirit, ridding myself of metabolism and the Heavy Judger of Gravity.

At the Romantic outset, Beethovenish, I am still awake without any mental reservations, brooding over this densifying feeling, which spreads in thin, transparent, oily layers over the flat rocks of Sweden’s West Coast, the basset clarinet talking the lyrical and 1940s’ language of ships on the outer perimeter of the archipelago, in ascending and descending thoughts of sea gulls, pure and Nordic, and so much home to me, psychologically.

As the orchestra glides sideways through this Kingdom of Minerals, I drift farther astray in my sleepiness, through this land of curving backs of giants across the salty expanses, tickled by seaweed, my disengage, detached mind crowding with magic names: Pater Noster, Vedhall, Vinga, Onsala, Donsö…

The Kingdom of Plants, part II of Jonas Forssell’s work, flows in the most melodious adventure across the magnificence of the score. Staffan Martinsson plays like a Mediterranean god, breathing, as it seems, through the melody, partly because there is a wave motion passing continuously for a long time, in the clarinet, backed up by an orchestra that gradually rises into tight thunder, into such a dangerous jubilance that I want to get up and rush to call somebody – and partly because Mårtensson, as he has stated before - uses circular breathing through some of these passages. The music gathers momentum and strength and power and rising motion, like a tsunami towering towards shore, but then it slowly recedes into a peace that is all the more still and restful and meditative, as it was preceded by such thunderous danger escalating over matters of men. Magnificent music, wonderful composition, and brilliant – brilliant! – playing!

The last section of Jonas Forssell’s In the Beginning is part III, The Kingdom of Animals. It doesn’t hold back one ounce at the onset; banging away like a herd of wrathful elephants, storming at you with colorful parrots around their wrinkled heads!
The music is a terrifying and marvelous jungle, with the most rhythmic stretches of this great work, and full of glistening details and spiraling liana in your way towards salvation from the revenge of the fauna.
Staffan Martinsson plays his clarinet in lofty, airy plunges through long orchestral silences or semi-silences, throwing serpentines of jubilance along the way, along the bronze-glowing trajectories. I am impressed, and feel elevated!

Carina Bartosch Edström appears on track 4 with her composition Already Morning! It’s a soloist piece which begins ever so carefully, and soon discloses a surprise: a voice with the playing, like you maybe tried yourself to sing through a recorder in school while you also played tones on the instrument. I suppose it’s Martinsson who uses his voice, but I can’t be sure, for the voice sounds remarkably female at times, but then again it’s hard to judge through the music of the clarinet – which Martinsson also plats in many other slightly awkward practices, like slap tongue, multiphonics and so forth… but without tiring me; he keeps my interest and listening joy up, just the way I experienced so many times with Stockhausen’s pupils and musicians in Kürten, Germany, during his summer courses, when the players of wind instruments almost always use many various playing techniques without any sense of mannerism.

I will just breeze through a couple more of the works submitted on this great release, but I think it will still convince you that it has been an unusually successful portraits CD of s soloist, because I am truly convinced and totally persuaded of the great artistry of this Staffan Mårtensson.

The next track I decided to listen a little extra to is Fredrik Söderberg’s Wrong Music 2 – Embryo for Solo Clarinet and Live Electronics. The title is mesmerizing! I like a man with innovative titles, and I have one favorite so far, in that gebiet: Henrik Strindberg! He always finds the most remarkable titles! So does Fredrik Söderberg, at least in his Wrong Music series – or does the group just contain two works so far? May it grow! And maybe it will, which the subtitle “embryo" suggests?

He lets on that his inspiration partly comes with t he soaring timbres of Brian Eno, which may explain some of my immediate love for this piece. I have used the most highly ambient Eno pieces for falling-asleep music for many years; works like Discreet Music, Thursday Afternoon, Music for Airports and Neroli – and the little stack is still sitting by my bedside!

Fredrik Söderberg mentions that he’s not using electronic sounds, but recorded sounds from French horn and strings. The sound world of Söderberg, his recorded and treated natural sounds and the immaculate treading of Staffan Martinsson’s clarinet makes for a soaring, stretching, bulging, winding, sailing odyssey through contemplative but attentive and absentmindedly focused states of mind. The music becomes atmosphere and space, lucid, translucent, in fondling ballet motions ‘tween the galaxies. Wrong Music 2 is a rare occasion in contemporary music, and I am defenseless against it!

Sven-David Sandström is one grand old man, one must say, these days, with many important compositions to his credit, but still able to joke around outside the Concert Hall in Stockholm, waiting to get in with the others to the annual Polar Prize proceedings, but also taking the time to converse with an obtrusive backwards fellow who marveled at the sight of all the celebrities, as I saw it last year: a very human person.

The title of Sandström’s composition on this CD is taken from a peculiar, poetic suite by Swedish poet and writer Gunnar Ekelöf; A Mölna Elegy, running “…there is a bluer sky, a wall with roses…”
Sandström let’s the clarinet of his careful score travel an inward journey of thoughtfulness and light lamentation, or perhaps just lingering sentiments of the September of life, when the bees have fallen silent in the pavilion out in the orchard, and the light is particularly yellowish transparent; halcyon, like aphorist Vilhelm Ekelund had it as he walked the shores of Saltsjöbaden towards the conclusion of his earthly journey this time around, in the 1940s.

Staffan Martinsson plays this music with the uttermost diligence, kind of resting in the flow of time, in time as such, totally at peace with the passing of things, obviously at terms with the conditions of life – as the music of Sven-David Sandström so marvelously describes it in his composition: a perfect match between composer and musician: a wonderful CD through and through: a rare one.