When reviewing discs I like to be positive. If a piece pleases my ear, then “Well done” to composer (and executants); if not, then I am probably just noton the composer’s wavelength. Even with a real stinker I search for some redeeming feature. Here it is the standard of playing and recording, both very good; indeed I cannot imagine either work being presented in a more favourable way.
My problem is with the music itself. Pehr Henrik Nordgren (b.1944) is one of Finland’s more distinguished composers, specializing in composition for strings. I have enjoyed several of his smaller pieces, though his concertos – such as the Second for violin (1977, available on BIS) or the Third (1983), just reissued in Finlandia’s “Meet the composer” series – have impressed me less. The half-hour-long Fourth (1994) is described in Kimmo Korhonen’s notes as “one long cadenza with orchestral accompaniment”; that suggested formlessness to me, and I found the piece very dull. It is not that the work lacks incident: at any given point the music is expressive or evocative, in a generally bleak, tragic vein, but it never seems to go anywhere. This applies also to the four-movement Cronaca (1991; irresponsibly, the documentation gives no hint of what the title means, or the dispositions – even the timings – of the individual movements), and only the third span, Agitato, breaks (only just) the predominantly slow pulse of either work.
To those who like this kind of music (a sort of minimalism without repetition), I commend this issue; to anyone who thinks like me, try elsewhere.'