…silence is music too…

For many listeners, the name of Axel Borup-Jørgensen may come as a new discovery, and yet during his long and productive creative life (with more than 180 opus number in his catalogue), he was a seminal figure in contemporary Danish musical life and the recipient of a number of the country’s most distinguished awards, including the Carl Nielsen Prize and the Wilhelm Hansen Prize.

Borup-Jørgensen considered himself a self-taught composer; while being thoroughly “modern” in outlook, his music is organic, expressionist, aphoristic – even “painterly,” always embracing the sheer sensual beauty of the musical tone. Perhaps more than anything else, it was this “organic” quality that attracted Borup-Jørgensen to the recorder, and to Michala Petri.

This recording presents Borup-Jørgensen’s complete works for recorder; a chronicle of a 30 year relationship that began when his daughter, Elisabet Selin became Michala Petri’s first and only private student. Over the years, Michala and Elisabet performed on a number of critically acclaimed recordings but none as special as this; as the artists for whom these works were originally composed, their interpretations are both personal and authoritative. Beginning with the Fantasia for sopranino recorder and harpsichord op. 75 from 1975 and concluding with Pergolato op. 183, composed the year before the composer’s passing, each work carefully explores the potential of the recorder as a melody instrument and as a source of new forms of acoustic expression.