Such early pieces as I have encountered by the Dane Anders Nordentoft (b.1957, a pupil of Norgard and Norholm), among them the String Quartet and the clarinet-cello-piano trio The Nervous Saurian (both from 1989), tend to be full of nervous energy, with a hard-edged sound. In the case of the Quartet the music seemed ill at ease with itself. Entgegen (“Against” or “Towards”, 1985) is of a similar cast, but strikes me as the sum of its parts where the Quartet was not. It could be that the latter was a touch transitional in style, beginning to point the way to the more fluid, neo-melodic writing encountered in The City of Threads (1994) and Hymne (1996), and there is something of that about Zenevera Sesio (1992) also. Nordentoft’s music always possesses a strong narrative impulse, sometimes derived from a particular source – as in Zenevera Sesio from Michael Strunge’s poem A Test Card – though Anders Beyer’s elusive notes give no hint of any extra-musical inspiration for the other compositions.
The London Sinfonietta sound in typically fine fettle, under the ever dependable Elgar Howarth. There are no rival versions of any of these pieces, though it is instructive to compare them with works of a contemporary such as Magnus Lindberg. Where Lindberg is often mercurial and unpredictable in invention, Nordentoft is stabler and more cosmopolitan in sound; but in striving less high, the Dane may just achieve more.'