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Knut Vaage - In Memoriam for string quartet
(b. 14.10.1961, Sunde)
First performance: October 15th 1995, Gunnar Sævigsalen, Bergen (Norway)
by Ricardo Odriozola, Britta Skärby-Vindenes (violins) Nora Taksdal (viola), Jane Goodwin (cello)
Knut Vaage, born 1961, is a Bergen-based Norwegian composer. He graduated as a pianist and composer from the Grieg Academy in Bergen. Vaage has worked in different styles of music, with special focus on improvised and contemporary music. Many of his projects have investigated the boundaries between improvisation and composed music. Vaage’s production ranges from symphonic works and opera to solo pieces. His music is frequently performed at concerts and festivals in Norway and abroad. Much of Vaage’s instrumental music has been released on CD.
Investigation of the acoustic/electronic hybrid-sound is another important area in Vaage’s music. He has also written a number of vocal works and works for the stage.
As an improviser Vaage early on explored the boundaries between improvisation and composition as a member of the trio JKL. The tension created between acoustic instruments and electronics was an important ingredient of their style. Vaage’s work with improvisation continues with the band Fat Battery, and in staged works like “Achilles or Stupor”, premiered at Grec Festival in Barcelona in 2015.
The dissemination of contemporary music for a wider audience forms an important part of Vaage's compositional activity. He has participated in different concert projects aimed towards children, teenagers, and local choirs and orchestras. Vaage has also been deeply involved in administrative work, having served as leader and board member of several contemporary music organizations in Norway. http://www.knutvaage.com/
Vaage wrote In Memoriam in response to the untimely death by cancer of the actor and theatre director Sigurd Lysbakken (1947 - 1994). Vaage had the previous year collaborated with Lysbakken on a production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, for which he had written the incidental music.
As befits a work of its kind, In Memoriam is elegiac in quality. At about five minutes in duration, it is a relatively short composition. It ranks amongst Vaage's most intimate and vulnerable works. The first 23 measures create the atmosphere of a wake: the instruments take turns in offering their view on the dismal situation, with their rising and falling lines. This plays out against a background of continuous but changing harmony. Between measures 24 and 29 all four instruments rise in a common glissando. This unleashes the most intense section of the piece, between mm. 30 and 38, where a very dense polyphony creates a sense of anguish before being subdued into a veiled trill. The next section (mm. 38-59) returns to the bleak despondency of the beginning, the first violin and cello now given more time to express their sorrow in phrases that keep reverting to the same pitch. A final, more extended up-and-down arch (mm. 51-59) finally brings all four instruments to coalesce into a unison. This links to the coda, where ethereal harmonics provide the back curtain for a wistful cello melody, played on a repeated rhythm. Curiously, the work ends on a Dominant harmony, although the preponderance of the airy texture does not make this immediately apparent.
Vaage attached to this work a verse from a poem by Arnulf Øverland, with permission from the Øverland estate, extended to this edition:
'Og engang kommer den hellige natt
da evighetens sordiner
forvandler den bitreste kval, du har hatt
til hundrede fioliner'
(And shall the holy night one time arrive
when eternity's sordines
transform the bitterest anguish that you've had
into a hundred violins)
(English translation: Ricardo Odriozola)
Ricardo Odriozola, August 23, 2023
German preface not available ...
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