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Described as a "crossover" opera, heavily electronically processed vocals and electrified instruments here lurch crazily between Anton Webern and Rock/Jazz. Sometimes works of this type can achieve interesting rhythms or sonorities, even quite sensual ones, but the composer’s talent seems to be dedicated to making everything sound as ugly as possible. The poetry is the "heavy shit man" variety where incomprehensibility alternating with maudlin banality is taken for profundity, e.g.:

‘If you lose your sight

Don’t be afraid.

There’s so much work

To be done for the blind.

And people will be so kind.

If you wake up without your tongue,

Just stutter your way.

And you will see

What life can also be.’

It might sound better in Danish translation. If the composer had told us which drug we should use to make this all clear it might have helped. I can tell you that aspirin afterwards is a great help.

The following statement from his website might clarify matters: "Anders Nordentoft studied composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, where his teachers were Ib Nørholm and Hans Abrahamsen. Further composition studies with Per Nørgård at the Academy of Music in Aarhus. In his works Nordentoft challenges himself with wild expressiveness and tensions, but must first and foremost be described as a lyrical and narrative composer. Behind his fine feeling for the immediate and the physical in music lies a delicate world of poetry and childlike innocence." From the photograph, he seems like a pleasant, even charming man. He wrote a Duo for Violin and Flute in 1975, but most of his music bears titles which suggest wild experiments.

Even if you really, really love the weird, exotic, trendy, and experimental, try to hear some of this before you put your money down.

Paul Shoemaker

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