Chamber Concertos

Always Moving

By Andrew Mellor

Anders Koppel was born into Denmark’s most prominent and wide-ranging musical dynasty. His father Herman D. Koppel (1908–1988) was a noted pianist and composer who would become Professor of Composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. Two of Herman’s four children – Anders and Thomas – established the psychedelic rock group The Savage Rose in 1967, setting it on its way to becoming one of the most widely followed bands in Denmark. It still plays today, staffed in part by the latest generation of Koppels.

Anders Koppel benefitted from a borderless view of music. He mastered the piano and clarinet and participated in performances of his father’s works while also indulging a passion for jazz, rock and ethnic music. In 1974 he quit The Savage Rose to pursue other interests including his world music trio Bazaar and the composition of notated scores. For many years, Koppel worked as a composer for film, television, theatre and dance. From the 1990s he was particularly associated with the dance group now known as Dansk Danseteater, a relationship that seemed like a perfect fit for his rhythmic instinct.

Koppel’s concert music initially fell under the influence of the avant-garde musical revolutions of the 1960s before settling into something resembling the lucid neo-classicism of his father, just with a far more gregarious manner. His works since the turn of the century have tended to pick up on various traditions and styles and celebrate them – particularly music of the Americas – while consistently displaying fun-loving, impulsive and mobile qualities. ‘I really want my music to speak as simply as it can,’ he once said; ‘…sometimes it needs to be complicated and that’s just the way it is, but there is no reason to make it more complicated than it needs to be. Because I want my music to speak to the audience.’

Koppel’s thirty-six concertos to date (two were in progress at the time of writing) are testament to his music’s communicative and structural strength and its respect for musicians and listeners. It is rarely Koppel’s desire to write ‘against’ an instrument or seek out sounds that have never emanated from it before. Rather, he sees a solo instrument as a conduit for charisma and a means of bridging the gap between stage and audience. Concerto form, he says, offers an ‘exchange of energies which is highly perceptible to the audience.’ Solo instruments, meanwhile, allow Koppel to pursue his particular view of melody as an element of music capable of unfolding great depth of character.

Still, those concertos reflect Koppel’s broad sonic interests in their configuration despite their generally traditional fast-slow-fast form. Among his many concertante works are concertos for Percussion (2001), Tuba (2003), Trash (2007), Aluphone (2014) and two each for Accordion (2009 and 2016) and Saxophone (1992 and 2003) and four for Marimba (1995, 2000, 2002/03 and 2006). Added to these are multiple double and triple concertos, many featuring saxophone and written for his saxophonist son Benjamin. They include triple concertos for Alto Saxophone, Cello and Harp (2009) and Saxophone, Piano and Orchestra (2006).

The Danish Sinfonietta © PR

Concertino for Two Guitars and Chamber Ensemble

In 2003, Koppel completed a bijoux ‘concertino’ for two guitars and ensemble commissioned by the Scandinavian Guitar Duo of Per Pålsson and Jesper Sivebæk and the Danish Sinfonietta, using material from Koppel’s earlier Four Pieces for Guitar Duo (1998). The tutti ensemble comprises strings, woodwinds minus oboe, horn and a varied percussion group including but not limited to woodblocks, crotales, egg shaker, maracas, chimes and tubular bells.

Those percussion instruments prove their worth as the concerto places Latin grooves in the context of a cool Nordic temperament. After opening with something like an evocation of dusk, the first movement slips into a characteristic Brazilian ‘choro’ dance rhythm with two beats to the bar while retaining that Koppel hallmark of consistent forward movement and thematic churn. The music thinks on its feet as it negotiates elusive tonalities and the eddying antiphonal conversation of the two soloists. Ultimately, no dramatic interventions prove able to knock the music off its fundamental course.

The laconic Andante sostenuto is initially underpinned by a louche egg shaker but soon comes to embody something more Arcadian courtesy of flute glissandi that might have come out of a score by Debussy. A solo horn, meanwhile, keeps the atmosphere lethargic until a big ritardando sees the movement drift off into asleep. When the Allegro con brio has sidled into a tango, the concerto’s first tensions emerge. The music ratchets up through beguiling harmonic steps – a gesture made all the more pungent by the translucent scoring – towards a series of miniature solos for the pair of guitars. An almost confrontational air then emerges between soloists and ensemble, the latter luring the guitars into a full cadenza, before the music finds safe haven in the groove of the maracas.

Andorinha

Andorinha (‘The Swallow’) – Koppel's concerto for flute and chamber ensemble, which had its premiere at Ulstrup Castle in May 2014 – was commissioned by flautist Rune Most and the Danish Sinfonietta for a tour in Brazil. Appropriately, the work betrays its composer’s love for South American music almost immediately with an intoxicating combination of syncopated rhythms and slinky nocturnal melodies, both contributing to an inexorable sense of forward movement.

The ‘swallow’ of the title makes itself felt in detailed, circular flute figurations that stammer as often as they fluently metamorphose. Instrumental factions split the ensemble wittily open with fleeting scales in parallel or contrary motion. The sense is of creatures clawing upwards or slipping downwards – always by degrees. In the first movement cadenza, the solo flute tries earnestly to achieve upward traction as if its swallow alter ego is only just learning to fly. There’s just the slightest hint later on of Hans Christian Andersen’s clockwork nightingale.

A horn signalling in open fifths ushers in the Largo and is echoed immediately by the soloist. This movement recalls the Arcadian atmosphere of the central movement of the Concertino of a decade earlier, but here the bluesy flute is even more prone to slumber. In a tiny cadenza, it can only muster three incarnations of the same basic phrase shape – a little turn with an ascending tail.

There is a cartoon-like feel to the Andantino, in which the fully agile swallow takes flight in and around the orchestra, chasing and teasing. The clarity and wit in Koppel’s writing – as detailed as it needs to be, but no more – recalls the neo-classical panache of Poulenc and Stravinsky. Rhythmic tricks gain prominence in the final movement but are punctured by swooning lyricism from strings. The energy drains in the final bars and the music slows to a crawl. It can only just cross the finish line.

Harpo

Koppel wrote his concerto for harp and chamber ensemble, Harpo, in the autumn of 2021. It was commissioned by the Danish Sinfonietta and Tine Rehling – the latter a Danish harpist and former principal of the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra. Her long collaboration with the composer inspired the work, but not on its own.

‘An early inspiration was also Harpo Marx of the Marx Brothers,’ writes the composer in the score; ‘dumb as he is, Harpo speaks only through music and movement. His harp playing is exquisite and his musical phrasing eloquent. His energy is unconventional and his presence poetic. All of this created the atmosphere in which I composed Harpo.’ (Marx’s name was derived from his self-taught ability to play the instrument).

There is a transatlantic air to the concerto, which uses harmonic and rhythmic loops familiar from American minimalism (even if the rhythms here are, once more, syncopated by Latino dances) and whose tonal movement glances in the direction of Philip Glass. The opening Andante energico is characterized by glistening movement, constant were it not for abrupt, halting silences. Koppel relishes the harp’s capacity for piquant harmonies while also reflecting them in the orchestra. He brings a sense of mischief to an instrument normally associated with the angelic.

The second movement is a swaying Largo sprinkled with gentle dissonances by a lyrical horn. The music comes to resemble a dumb show, where gestures from the ensemble on the sidelines could just as easily have come from an impressionistic orchestral score as from a swing band. After a magical, spacious cadenza for the soloist, the music is lulled into a series of beguiling exhalations. Another looping pattern is set up in the brief Allegro con brio, this time rhythmic, first on strings but soon taken on by winds. The music distils rapidly until all that remains is the dominant solo harp over whispering flute, bassoon and low strings.
 

Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press).