07/02/2011
In recent years the young composer Simon Steen-Andersen (b. 1976) has been experiencing quite overwhelming international awareness of his music, and has just had a whole portrait CD released on Dacapo Records. The CD was recorded by the Norwegian elite ensemble Asamisimasa and was launched at the end of January at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin.
Simon Steen-Andersen has already travelled more and farther than most composers of his generation. He has lived and worked in places as different as Paris, Freiburg, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen. Rome - and his home town Aarhus. At present Simon lives in Berlin as "artist-in-residence" under the prominent DAAD programme.
Here Simon tells us which music in Dacapo's collection of a good 500 albums of Danish-composed music has made the biggest impression on him.
Simon Steen-Andersen recommends...
Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen: Tonkraftwerk
Helene Gjerris, Århus Sinfonietta, Søren K. Hansen etc.
"I attended the first performance of Tonkraftwerk in 1999 by Århus Sinfonietta, and it completely blew me over. A musical party that made a huge impression on me both with its difference and its immediacy. "
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Rued Langgaard: Music of the Spheres
Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Choirs, Thomas Dausgaard etc.
"Early Danish experimental composition music with an international impact. At least as many of the younger generation of composers know this work as know Nielsen's symphonies."
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Pelle Gudmundsen-Holgreen: Chamber Music
LIN Ensemble
"Grotesque combinations and ingenious musical entities. I'll never forget a performance of Plateau pour Deux where the squeeze-bulb horn of the first movement was held high ready for entry again in the cello solo of the third movement, which made the relatively simple melody seem infinitely suspenseful and fragile."
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