My first encounter with Karin Rehnqvist’s music was in 1999 on a pioneering Phono Suecia album from 1996 whose opening piece, the title-track Davids nimm (1984), is a bright, arresting work for three female singers, either unaccompanied (as on that CD) or with an ad lib women’s chorus. Based on a tape recording of Swedish polska folk song Minns du vad? (‘Do You Remember What?’) played backwards (the title is also a play on the polska title in reverse), it divided opinion when it was first unveiled. However, it was the vocal cycle Timpanum Songs – Herding Calls (1989) that pinned my ears back. Commissioned for the Falun Folk Music Festival, Rehnqvist’s provocative conception was for the folk singers Lena Willemark and Susanne Rosenberg and percussionist Helena Gabrielsson to render five songs concerning women in rural Sweden, for which she took a very specific folk tradition, the piercing calls known as kulning (of which more below), and made it her own. The album also contained two strong orchestral works: Lamento – Vibrations of a Voice (1993), composed for the Royal Stockholm PO, and the dreamlike The Time of Taromir (1985-87) for chamber orchestra. By the time I came to select my Critics’ Choice for 1999, when we had the luxury of six choices, I concluded merely with the ‘stunning’ BIS CD that I’d reviewed in September that year (which features a reissue of Timpanum Songs – Herding Calls) and from which I was ‘still in shock’ (1/00).

The composer’s website defines kulning as ‘an archaic style of singing/calling used to call the cows and goats down from high mountain pastures where they have been grazing during the day. “The song of kulning” has a high-pitched vocal technique, i.e. a loud call using head tones.’ Timpanum Songs – Herding Calls proved a watershed moment in the development of Rehnqvist’s personal style. Kulning is absent from earlier works such as the curious, emotionally elusive 1984 Dance for piano, but the ‘Davids nimm’ album confirmed that by the mid-1990s it was the core element of Rehnqvist’s compositional style, giving her music as distinctive a voice as that of Ligeti or Per Nørgård, and setting her apart not just from close contemporaries and compatriots such as Marie Samuelsson, but from other composers outside Sweden. She does share a common exploratory outlook with Cecilie Ore in Norway, and also with Sally Beamish, with whom she held an overlapping composition residency with the Scottish and Swedish chamber orchestras, Rehnqvist’s tenure being from 2000 to 2004. Rehnqvist and Beamish became lifelong friends despite being markedly different types of composer. Rehnqvist (unlike Beamish) has avoided traditional forms such as the symphony and the string quartet, although she has written several operas and in 2017 wrote a short piece, The Riddle, for the Kronos Quartet.

Rehnqvist’s modernist credentials were evident from the outset of her career. She studied mainly at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where until 1984 her teachers included Gunnar Bucht, Pär Lindgren and (as guest lecturer) Brian Ferneyhough. The earliest acknowledged composition on her website, Three Christopher Robin Songs for soprano and piano, dates from 1978 and signals her interest in writing music for or about children, heard most recently in the choral song I Know, I’m Able (2023) for children’s voices, saxophone and piano, premiered at a preludial concert a few days before last year’s Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Her most notable work involving children’s voices is Light of Light (2003), a cantata in three movements (‘Bright, shimmering’, ‘Dark, compelling’ and ‘Bright, Intense’) designed, in the composer’s words, as ‘a Song of Praise. A praise to the wonderfulness in our existence, to life, to nature’. Sometimes described, not really accurately, as a choral symphony, this 15-minute work was commissioned jointly by Radio France, Swedish Radio and the Swedish Concerts Institute.

The dominant genre in Rehnqvist’s catalogue is vocal and choral music, particularly for female voices, fostered by her appointment in 1976, while still a student, as the Artistic Director and Conductor of the amateur Stockholm choir Stans Kör (City Choir). Her choral works from this period include Sourdough (1983), a song for treble voices and ad lib instruments; the a cappella ‘drama’ Tilt (1985); and The Fields of Light (1989) for either mixed or women’s chorus and ad lib string trio. By the time Rehnqvist relinquished the Stans Kör appointment, in 1991, she had become one of the leading composers of her generation not just in Sweden, but in northern Europe. Works for voices have flowed unabated from her pen ever since, both small (such as Songs from the Earth, a diptych written for treble chorus in 1992, reworked for mixed choir in 2008; and the evocative blend of kulning and folk music that is the much-performed In Heaven’s Hall, 1998, which exists in several versions) and large (such as Light of Light; and two half-hour-long works – Requiem aeternam (2008), which follows its own structure rather then the standard liturgy, and the ecological crisis-inspired Silent Earth (2020). The premiere of this last was delayed by Covid lockdowns until January 2022, when it was unveiled at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and won her the Nordic Council Music Prize that year.

Rehnqvist has received many prizes for her music, including the 1997 Christ Johnson Prize for another compelling song-cycle, Sun Song (1994) for soprano accompanied by two female speakers and chamber orchestra and setting an Old Norse (Iceland, c1200) lament interlaced with modern poetic and scientific texts. While the composer directs that the soprano’s part must always be sung in Swedish, the spoken texts can be ‘translated into a language understandable to the audience’.

While choral music has remained an essential part of her musical make-up, Rehnqvist’s output contains a fair number of instrumental and orchestral compositions, although rarely in conventional genres and relatively less well represented on record. An early, typically unusual example is the delightful Streams (1992) for solo bass cimbalom (written for Jonny Axelsson, who recorded it in 1999 for Phono Suecia). In the fine piano trio Beginning (2003), jointly commissioned by the BBC and Royal Philharmonic Society for the Kungsbacka Trio, folk influences are less overt. Rehnqvist has given an almost programmatic description of the work as being ‘about Creation’. For her, it’s ‘a wrestling with musical material that appears to assume a life of its own’. Whether the three movements are the outcome of her struggle, or merely a depiction of it, Beginning is a strong addition to the repertoire.

Rehnqvist’s clarinet concerto On a Distant Shore (2002), a product of her residency with the Scottish and Swedish chamber orchestras, is a compact 18-minute work in five movements which packs a good deal of expressive as well as instrumental incident into a short space. The composer has stated that the piece is ‘a metaphorical representation of society: the individual at the centre of the collective, the individual emerging from the collective, and the individual against the collective’. On a Distant Shore showed how far she had progressed in integrating kulning into a more unified musical language.

Another product of the same residency, Arktis Arktis! (2000-01) originated in Rehnqvist’s impressions of the Arctic Ocean after taking part in a Swedish polar expedition in 1999. She is not the first Swedish composer to portray the top of the world after seeing it at first hand (think of Nystroem’s symphonic poem Arctic Ocean of 1924-25), and she provided a detailed account of the experiences behind the music, including ‘the panoramic views, the horizons, the quivering effect when hot and cold air meet’, the tundra of the subpolar regions, its flora and fauna and the intense ‘shimmering, glimmering light’. The third-movement, ‘Interlude in Dark’, describes how meteorological depressions hemmed in the explorers, grey-blinding them with fog, the barometric pressure causing fatigue and headaches. It is a disturbing, alarming movement whose catharsis comes with the finale, ‘Yearning’, a partial recapitulation – though this is no sonata structure.

Many significant works are yet to be recorded, whether the violin concerto Shouts (1990), Preludes (2005-06) for large orchestra, the opera Drifted (2007-15) or the monodrama Bloodhoof (2016-19). An August 2022 performance of Silent Earth is due to be released on digital platforms, and a recording of the choral cycle Songs between Light and Darkness (2022) is set to come out soon, as well as a new one of Timpanum Songs – Herding Calls. That Rehnqvist has established herself and maintained her position in the ranks of Europe’s living composers with only a part of her output known is testament to the strength of her music as a whole, and there is still so much more to come.

Rehnqvist Recordings

‘Sun Song: Music by Karin Rehnqvist’

Lena Willemark, Susanne Rosenberg sops Nina Persson, Maria Garelöv-Thorsell spkrs Helena Gabrielsson perc Allmänna Sången / Cecilia Rydinger; Sundsvall CO / Niklas Willén BIS (9/99)

This superlative disc opens with Timpanum Songs – Herding Calls, which electrified and provoked early listeners in equal measure, and concludes with Sun Song, its centrepiece the powerful When You But Walk on the Ground (1995) for a cappella mixed chorus.

’Live’

Adolf Fredrik Girls’ Ch, Swedish RSO / Manfred Honeck; Netherlands Chbr Ch, Nieuw Ens / Ed Spanjaard et al Sterling

This 2013 album constitutes the finest introduction overall to Rehnqvist’s vocal output, from the choral triptychs Light of Light and Salve regina – Heavenly Queen (2007) to more complex tableaux such as Who’s that Calling? (2007) and Music for a Sleeper (1998). To the Angel with Fiery Hands (2000) and Hymn (2010) show very different sides to her compositional character.

’Arktis Arktis! – Works by Karin Rehnqvist’

Martin Fröst cl Swedish CO / Petter Sundkvist, John Storgårds; Kungsbacka Trio; Adolf Fredrik Girls’ Choir / Bo Johansson BIS

Recorded in typical first-rate sound by BIS, and released in 2005, this magnificent album comprises the highly atmospheric clarinet concerto On a Distant Shore compellingly performed by Martin Fröst, for whom it was written, the gripping Arktis Arktis!, the piano trio Beginning and the beautiful arrangement In Heaven’s Hall (1998), which combines Swedish folk song and the composer’s trademark kulning.

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today