Ketil Hvoslef - Nordisk Kontrapunkt for Feler og Flasker
(Nordic counterpoint for fiddles and bottles) (1973)
(b. July 19th 1939)
Premiered on NRK television, 1974
Ketil Hvoslef was born in Bergen on July 19th 1939. He is the youngest son of Harald Sæverud and Marie Hvoslef. His birth coincided with the completion of Siljustøl, the great mansion in the outskirts of Bergen where the Sæverud family settled and where Harald Sæverud lived until his passing in 1992.
Being the son of a great composer, music was naturally very present during Hvoslef’s upbringing. He learned to play the piano and the viola and, in his teens, he became heavily involved in Bergen's jazz and pop music environment, becoming a member of what was, reportedly, Bergen's first rock band. Hvoslef (who retained the Sæverud surname until his 40th birthday, when he decided to adopt that of his mother) had, however, plans to become a painter and took serious steps in that direction. It was in the Bergen Art Academy that he met the painter Inger Bergitte Flatebø (1938 - 2008), who would become his wife and adopt the Sæverud surname.
With the birth of their first child, Trond, in 1962, Hvoslef abandoned his dreams of becoming either a pop star or a painter and he took an organist's diploma at the Bergen Music Conservatoire. Upon finishing his studies, he was offered a position as theory teacher at the Conservatoire by its director, the legendary Gunnar Sævig (1924 - 1969).
Hvoslef became a composer almost by accident. In his 25th year he composed a piano concertino for his own satisfaction. Shortly after, his father passed on to him a commission for a woodwind quintet he had no time or inclination to write. And after that he simply kept going. He had study periods in Stockholm (with Karl-Birger Blomdahl and Ingvar Lindholm) and in London (with Henri Lazarof and Thomas Rajna).
Since the 1970s Hvoslef has received a fairly steady stream of commissions and his work list counts with some 140 compositions to date. Hvoslef always enjoys a challenge and he has often written for unusual or seemingly "hopeless" instrumental combinations, always using the limitations of the ensemble as a stimulant for his imagination.
He has written for large orchestra, for a great variety of chamber ensembles and for solo instruments. He has so far composed nineteen concertos and three operas.
Hvoslef was the Festival Composer in the Bergen International Festival in 1990 and has received several prizes, such as the Norwegian Composers' Society's "work of the year" in four occasions (1978, 1980, 1985 and 1992) and TONO's Edvard Prisen in 2011.
Hvoslef's music is characterized by great transparency and by a conscious building of tension achieved by accumulating latent energy. He wants his listeners to lean forward and listen rather than sit back and be lulled into a reverie. Listening to a Hvoslef composition is always an adventure: one never knows what to expect. He stretches sections of the music almost to breaking point and only then introduces a new idea. His music has a classical clarity and transparency and is therefore always easy to follow. Although his very personal and concentrated language is very much of its time, Hvoslef is not averse to using material that is recognizably tonal (such as major and minor triads) albeit always in a context that sets these familiar sounds in conflict with their surroundings. Rhythm is a very prominent aspect of Hvoslef’s music. Although the vast majority of his production is notated in 4/4 metre, his rhythmical patterns almost never conform to it, always favouring patterns of odd-numbered notes.
Ketil Hvoslef is, without a doubt, one of the greatest composers to emerge from Scandinavia in the past fifty years.
Nordisk Kontrapunkt for Feler og Flasker was written as intermission music for the extremely popular Scandinavian classical music Television quiz program Kontrapunkt, which ran between 1964 and 1980 and later between 1985 and 1998. On its heyday the program leader was Sten Broman (1902 - 1983). The competing teams (two at a time) came from all the Scandinavian countries, and consisted of three members each.
Hvoslef explains that the miniature he composed for the program reflected the position of the teams at the time. The leading Norwegian team is represented by the first violin. The second violin represents the Swedish team while the Danes, who were, as usual (according to Hvoslef) lagging hopelessly behind console themselves with their bottles.
This is one of Hvoslef's most popular works and it is performed with relative regularity. In never fails to elicit a smile from the listeners. The sight of one sorry looking character blowing alternatively on six bottles while the two violinists attempt to whip up a folk dance makes a memorable impact. This is, however, not a mere piece of humorous entertainment. Hvoslef is very specific about the way he wants it to sound. For the recording that was made of the piece on LWC 1130 (the fourth volume of Hvoslef's complete chamber music undertaken by the LAWO record company in Norway) the composer insisted that the piece be performed using six original bottles of different sizes from Bergen's Hansa brewery. They produce the exact sound he had in mind.
Although, in typical Hvoslef fashion, the piece is written in 4/4 time, not once can one discern by listening what the metre of the music is, since the weight points (as Hvoslef calls them) are constantly shifting.
Hvoslef recycled the material from this piece for his 1976 work "Variations for Chamber Orchestra".
Ricardo Odriozola 22. January 2020