Kenneth Sivertsen - Spør Vinden, for cello and guitar
(b. January 16th 1961, Bømlo. d. December 24th 2006, Bergen)
Date of first performance unknown
KENNETH SIVERTSEN (1961-2006) was arguably the most staggering musical talent to emerge from Norway at the tail end of the 20th century. Born in the island of Bømlo (south of Bergen) he learned to play the guitar at a very young age, soon forming a pop band with two of his older siblings and becoming very active in the local music scene. He took composition lessons from Magnar Åm (b. 1952) for a year and guitar lessons from Arild Hansson for a short period. Other than this Sivertsen was essentially self-taught. He wrote his first symphony at the age of twenty. At twenty five he was the youngest Norwegian to be accepted into the Norwegian Composers’ Union. His work For Ope Hav was chosen to represent Norway in the 1986 edition of Nordic Music Days in Iceland.
Sivertsen was equally active as a composer and performer. He was a world class guitarist and an able singer and pianist. Being of a restless and inquisitive nature he worked and excelled in many different musical genres: contemporary classical music, popular song, jazz and rock. He wrote two symphonies, numerous chamber works, many songs, an oratorio, a trumpet concerto, ballet music and a Requiem, besides countless arrangements. The recordings he left behind attest to his baffling versatility. These include several CDs of songs in popular style, an album of guitar compositions, ballet music, religious songs, chamber music and three acclaimed jazz albums in which he played with some of the world’s finest jazz musicians at the time.
Kenneth Sivertsen became a very public figure in Norway, particularly from the early 1990s. Besides his musical ability, he possessed an uncanny comical talent. The latter was exploited relentlessly by the media and made him a darling of the entertainment circuit in Norway for many years. The chaos of life of the road eventually took its toll on Sivertsen’s health. After several years of intermittent illness he died on Christmas Eve 2006.
Sivertsen’s music defies categorization. Surprising and unpredictable as life itself, it often changes atmosphere and style radically, even within the same composition. Sivertsen was a master at creating moods that draw the listener close to the music. He wrote some of the most beautiful and gripping music ever to come from a Norwegian composer.
Spør Vinden (“Ask the Wind”) was written between February 7th and 13th 1981 (Sivertsen was generally very precise in dating his manuscripts). The work’s full title is Adagio “Spør Vinden” for cello og gitar.
This short piece came soon after Largo (December) (mph 1935) and it predates Miniature Suite (mph 3010), written three months later. Given their chronology, and taking into consideration Sivertsen’s highly sensitive and sincere nature, it is quite possible that the three works, written in a short time span, were directly influenced by the untimely death of the composer’s father, which took place on December 9th 1980. Whereas Largo is overtly elegiac and Miniature Suite rather neurotic in nature, Spør Vinden has an idyllic air about it. It seems as if the composer is seeking solace in simple, beautiful music of a balmy, late summer character. The music is, however, imbued with a dignified melancholy characteristic of Sivertsen. Remarkably, the composer manages to create music that, although firmly rooted in Romantic and Impressionistic aesthetics and steeped in harmonies that can easily lend themselves to facile sentimentality, never becomes maudlin or predictable. There is no doubt about the music’s heartfelt sincerity, with its lovely melodic contours. Yet it is not music “about” the composer, but about recognizably universal human emotions.
The piece is cast in an organic (i.e. without clear separations) ABA form. The main, bittersweet theme gives way to a short cello solo which in turn introduces the short accompanied guitar solo of the middle section, in the very un-guitaristic and un-cellistic key of D sharp minor (a mild disruption of the idyll). Soon, however, both instruments navigate their way to a short, exalted episode in G major, a key always associated with positive, peaceful feelings in Sivertsen’s music. The music glides gently back into the opening theme, reinstating the first fifteen measures of the work and ending on a musical question mark.
Sivertsen recorded the piece with the cellist Aage Kvalbein (Sivertsen’s cellist of choice through his life) on the album “Spør Vinden” (NORCD 0990) which, except for the title work, consists of short pieces for solo guitar the composer wrote as a teenager. It is worthy of note that, in the recording, Sivertsen takes great liberties with the written dynamics and changes some notes and other details. The most significant deviations from the manuscript are shown at the end of the guitar part in this edition. Sivertsen was a late 20th Century embodiment of the Baroque-Classical-Romantic composer/performer entity. He performed Spør Vinden extensively throughout his life and it is quite possible that he made further transformations to the piece in the spur of the moment.
This edition is, by and large, a direct rendition of the manuscript except for the following enharmonic spellings:
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Measures 12 and 53: Ab and Gb (instead of G# and F#) on the guitar part.
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Measures 14–15 and 55–57: E# (instead of F natural) on the guitar part.
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Measures 28–29: Cx (instead of D natural) on the cello part.
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Measure 39: Bb and Eb (instead of A # and D #) on the cello part. Eb and Ab (instead of D# and G#) on the guitar part.
Measures 19 and 20 are left as in the manuscript, although strictly speaking a Cx would be more appropriate than a D natural.
Although no tempo indication is given in the manuscript, it is stated in the full title of the piece (Adagio).
Sivertsen’s seemingly casual slurs (found in of all of his scores) have been respected in this edition. They are not to be confused with phrasing slurs. They show Sivertsen’s wish for the music to retain the quality of an endless breath, a continuous flow that has begun before the music and will continue after it. Keeping this in mind, the cellist is free to use bowings that are appropriate to the singing, legato character of the music (as indeed Aage Kvalbein does in the aforementioned recording).
Ricardo Odriozola 13. July 2020