Christian Lindberg

Affirming Michael Nyman’s status as an innovator in orchestral music, these three concertos demonstrate a bold re-interpretation of musical traditions. Illustrating Nyman’s inventive approach to timbre in the Double Concerto for Saxophone, Cello and Orchestra, and including the virtuosic Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, this collection concludes with the Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra, a dramatic and tumultuous conflict between instruments.

On this disc Christian Lindberg joins the Taipei Chinese Orchestra in a programme of works for trombone and Chinese orchestra. The disc also includes one of his own works for the orchestra, inspired by the poetic sounds of the Chinese instruments: The Wild Rose.

Also by Lindberg, Kundraan was originally composed for trombone and chamber orchestra but was re-arranged for this disc.

Yiu-Kwong Chung has here adapted a famous aria from the Peking opera Cursing General Cao Cao into a striking piece in which the solo trombone is supported by the traditional trio of Peking Opera (clapper and drum, descant fiddle and lute) and orchestra.

For the Mongolian Fantasy, a couple of traditional songs and typical Mongolian throat-singing technique have provided the starting point.

Recueillement focuses on the first and last lines of Baudelaire’s poem.

One of the great musical communicators of our time, Trombonist Christian Lindberg performs virtuoso concertos dedicated by him by composers such as Berio and Xenakis, but is equally at home in light music genres. Here he pays his respects to the great trombonists of swing and jazz, revelling in Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade and Fats Waller's Keepin’ Out Of Mischief Now.

The 2011 centenary of Lindberg's fellow Swede, the great tenor Jussi Björling, has also occasioned a tribute in A Night at the Opera, a medley of favourite arias.

Lindberg's great friend Jan Sandström has contributed two pieces: Song to Lotta and A Christian Song, and in a nod to one of his first discs, Lindberg returns to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, giving a dare-devil performance of Spring on his alto trombone.

The swinging, glittering and lush accompaniments are provided by Lindberg's 'own' band – the Swedish Wind Ensemble of whom he is Chief Conductor.

The composer Niels Marthinsen belongs to a generation that has grown up with comic books, superheroes and science fiction, and Marthinsen welcomes all of these phenomena into his symphonic music. This recording features his Snapshot Symphony (2009), two of his special opera trailers and the ingenious concerto for three trombones and orchestra In the Shadow of the Bat (2009) – all in the hands of the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra conducted by the legendary trombone player Christian Lindberg.

Born in Hammerfest, situated some 450 km north of the Arctic Circle, Ole Olsen was a contemporary of Grieg and Svendsen. He studied at the conservatory in Leipzig and returning to Norway in 1874, Olsen completed his Symphony No. 1.

From early in his career he had been influenced by the major works of Wagner and Liszt, and it is possible that Liszt’s symphonic poems were the inspiration for Asgaardsreien (The Ride of Asgaard). In the work, Olsen vividly depicted the mythical ‘Wild Hunt’

This fascinating composer and his colourful music are portrayed here in the first recording by the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra, based in the region of Tromsø-Bodø. The orchestra’s flamboyant chief conductor, Christian Lindberg, also appears in his guise as trombone virtuoso in the first ever recording of Olsen’s Concerto for Tenor Trombone and Orchestra from 1886.