Fanfare 3

If your idea of Scandinavia is of a country (or several countries) whose people spend their lives direly contemplating their miseries and their inability ever to measure up to what God intends for them, this is the disc for you. There is not one iota of happiness or cheerfulness on this album. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” said the Biblical King Solomon, and in the opening song cycle by Pelle Gudmunsen-Holmgreen he goes on saying it, saying it again, and saying it some more.
Jakob Bloch Jespersen, who wrote the liner notes for this release as well as singing on it, said Gudmunsen-Holmgreen’s Seven Solomon Songs “has a highly unusual genesis”—an oddly Biblical turn of phrase for this context. They began as an opera called Sun Rises, Sun Sets, on which Gudmunsen-Holmgreen, “by his own account, worked on for more than 50 years,” according to Jespersen. That calls to mind Richard Strauss’s comment on one of his colleagues who spent 12 years writing an opera: “Why does he bother if it’s so difficult for him?”
Gudmunsen-Holmgreen’s original concept for Sun Rises, Sun Sets was to create an on-stage dialogue between the young and the old King Solomon as depicted in two Biblical books: the Song of Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes. He even had in mind two singers to play Solomon: a high baritone for the young Solomon and a deep bass for the old one. In 2015, with Gudmunsen-Holmgreen on his deathbed, Jespersen and Jens E. Christensen, then organist at Vor Freisers Kirke in Copenhagen, approached him with the idea of turning the opera’s depiction of the old Solomon into a seven-song cycle for bass and organ. They finished the project themselves after Gudmunsen-Holmgreen died in 2016.
Part of the problem is that Gudmunsen-Holmgreen had already cherry-picked the Book of Ecclesiastes, particularly chapters 1, 4, and 6, to emphasize its bitterest and most nihilistic sentiments. He totally skipped chapter 3, the “To everything there is a season …” part, which the late Pete Seeger turned into a beautiful folk-like song. Jespersen writes, “It seems natural to view the Old Solomon as Pelle Gudmunsen-Holmgreen’s self-portrait, focusing on that particular trait in Pelle’s personality which he himself described as ‘a failed pessimist’.” Frankly, I think he succeeded at being a pessimist.
Don’t let the title of Bent Lorentzen’s song cycle, Erotic Hymns, fool you. There’s plenty more of the hymnal than the erotic to them. Erotic Hymns is a nine-song cycle that alternates between texts from H. A. Brorson’s The Rare Treasure of Faith (1739) and more recent writings by Ole Sarvig from his 1981 collection Hymns and Beginnings for the 1980s. The notes describe Brorson’s poetry as “pietistic,” meaning that it casts the tie between Jesus and the souls he’s saved in what Jespersen calls a “bodily and erotic relationship to faith.”
The relationship between texts written in a more religious age like the 1730s and our own more skeptical time could have made for an interesting piece. Alas, despite Jespersen’s attempt in the notes to differentiate between the two, Lorentzen’s compositional style remains pretty much the same whether he’s setting the early 18th or late 20th century material. At least in Erotic Hymns Jespersen avoids the incessant banging on a bass drum (what the liner notes mean when they say he doubles voice and percussion) that he did in Gudmunsen-Holmgreen’s Seven Solomon Songs.
Alas, the bass drum returns in Nicolai Worsaae’s A Shipwreck, and so does the overall atmosphere of doom and gloom. Not for Worsaae and his text writer, Simon Grotrian (from poems of his collected in a 2010 book called Especially for the Living) the sheer joy of celebration which James Cameron put into the opening reels of his 1997 film Titanic to make the later tragedy seem more poignant. There are effects galore in A Shipwreck, including a ship’s bell and sirens, which I’m not sure whether they were played by Jespersen or on what organists call the “toy box” of their instruments—though since the record was made at the Vor Frelsers Kirke church, where Peter Navarro-Alonso succeeded Jens P. Christensen as organist when Christensen retired in 2021, I doubt if that organ has much of a “toy box.”
Jespersen and Navarro-Alonso perform this music with the sense of dutiful gloom it requires. Jespersen’s bass is big and bold, ably intoning the word “tomhed” (Danish for “vanity”). Most of the music doesn’t call for much from the organ player besides endless drones feeding Jespersen the basic chords, but on the few occasions where the organ is allowed to cut loose—like at 3:01 of the fourth of Seven Solomon Songs—Navarro-Alonso shows signs of being a highly competent player whom I’d like to hear more of in normal organ repertoire.
Through much of this album I was thinking that if Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, noted for his dark, gloomy movies about people falling short in their relationships with God, had made a musical, this would have been what it would have sounded like. Then I remembered that Bergman did make a musical, a stunning 1975 adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute that kept the sheer joy and spirit of Mozart’s and Emmanuel Schikaneder’s original. Instead I’d compare this to a classical version of the old joke made about the British rock band The Cure, noted for their relentlessly depressing songs: “music to commit suicide by.” Mark Gabrish Conlan