‘Serynade’, a new CD by the award-winning young Norwegian pianist Ellen Ugelvik, takes its title from the main work on the album by the celebrated contemporary German composer Helmut Lachenmann. The disc also includes music written for Ugelvik by two of the most significant of the current crop of Norwegian composers, Christian Blom (b. 1974) and Christian Jaksjø (b. 1973).
Helmut Lachenmann is one of the most important and original composers of our time. Ellen Ugelvik performed his piano concerto ‘Ausklang’ with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Christian Eggen in 2010, and her rendition of the concerto was nominated for the Norwegian Critics Prize for Music. Lachenmann’s Serynade is rarely performed because of its extreme difficulty. The pianist plays two music pieces on top of each another, one reverberating out in the room, while the other is mutely pressed down into the musical keyboard.
The two Norwegian compositions on this release, Christian Blom’s The Poetry of Manuals and Christian Jaksjø’s Encountering the Imaginary (Ulysses) have been written specifically for Ellen Ugelvik. In the first section of Blom’s piece a lyrical musical core is surrounded by a wall of staccato cluster chords, whilst in the second part the arrangement of chords is reminiscent of the music of Erik Satie. Jaksjø’s work incorporates a ring modulator to transmit sound back into the piano.
Pianist Ellen Ugelvik – winner of the Spellmannprisen (the Norwegian Grammy Award) in 2008 for her debut recording on Simax of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos (PSC1263) – has immersed herself in the performance of contemporary music and tours regularly as a soloist and chamber musician throughout the world. She was one of featured artists at this year’s Risør Chamber Music Festival, where she was the soloist in John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
