Danish composer Per Nørgard's 1972 opera Gilgamesh is among his
less intimidating works (though not as listener-friendly as his later
Siddharta). It attempts to embody timelessness through ritual-like
playing, or intoning, of small melodic cells, sometimes in a minimalist
way but more often like something by Harrison or perhaps Tormis. There's
definitely a lot more variety, and overt melodrama, in this work than
what the big-name minimalists were composing at this period. There are
definitely dissonant sections, but nothing atonal, or even
Lutoslawskian. The text is, of course, taken from the Babylonian epic,
the operas days and nights telling tales of Gilgamesh, Enkido,
Utnapishtim, Ishtar, and the others he encounters. After the opera, Disc
Two goes on to include Voyage into the Golden Screen, the
orchestral work that was PN's first major usage of a compositional
technique he calls the "infinity row", a sort of slowly-unfolding
dissonant minimalism. The first of its two movements is built around
long-held, glistening, Penderecki-like chords, the second, a largely
tonal cloud of overlapped and shifting arpeggios. On this long out of
print Dacapo two-CD set Tamas Veto conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony
Orchestra and Chorus in the opera, with Björn Haugen in the lead role;
Oliver Knussen leads the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Voyage. The
32-page booklet has notes and libretti in both Danish and English.
The disc
also includes the orchestral work Voyage into the Golden Screen, a
lulling and yet unsettling work, played by the Danish Radio Symphony orchestra
under Oliver Knussen.
From the Gramophone review:
If the archaeologists are correct, it was in the city of Uruk five millennia ago that men first led a recognizably urban existence. Not inappropriately then, for an opera based on the legend of Uruk's famous king, there is a pioneering, leap-in-the-dark quality about Per Norgard's music for Gilgamesh to match the epic of the first city, certainly nothing could be further removed from Martinu's treatment of the story. There is an alienness about the whole work, not least in its ritualistic atmosphere, that captures both the essence of the epic and the people that created it. Time and again one has the feeling of characters from some great carved frieze drawing breath as if for the first time. Heard in isolation on disc Norgard's conception is deprived of its visual and spatial elements, with audience and performers intermingled and the conductor required to transit between 'northern' and 'southern' rostra. The recording, of a 1973 Swedish Radio performance, manages with its shifting focus to realize something of the aural experience of a live Gilgamesh, so it is unfortunate that both the Danish and English notes omit the diagrammatic layout. Although there is no Danish antecedent for this opera ''in six days and seven nights'', Gilgamesh was not created in a vacuum. Norgard's music resonates both backwards in time through Blomdahl's Aniara to Les noces and in its soft, dream-like sonorities forwards to Nordheim's Shakespearean ballet The Tempest. The syllabic setting of the text is unusual for so inherently theatrical a work, yet there is no lack of dramatic tension. This arises from the inexorable momentum of the story itself, culminating in an ecstatic ''Creation Symphony'' in the sixth day, when Gilgamesh strives in vain to achieve immortality. Gilgamesh was completed in 1972; two years later it deservedly received the Nordic Council's Music Prize. The work receives powerful advocacy from Tamas Veto and his well-balanced cast. Precursors of the purely musical elements of Gilgamesh can, of course, be found in Norgard's own works, one of the most vital being Voyage into the Golden Screen (1968). This luminous work for chamber orchestra falls into two movements: the first unsettled the second filled by the emergence of Norgard's 'infinity' series. Voyage into the Golden Screen marks therefore the point of transition between the final works of Norgard's early period and his familiar mature style. The performance by the Danish RSO under Oliver Knussen dates from 1986 and is exemplary. All in all, a fine and thought-provoking issue.
Discs, booklet, and case are in mint condition.
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