Geirr Tveitt Orchestral Works – Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

A sophisticated neo-classicist of European calibre

Geirr Tveitt is one of the most distinctive composers in Norwegian musical history, an ardent nationalist with the sags and folk music as important sources of inspiration, and at the same time a sophisticated neo-classicist of European calibre. A tragic fire in 1970 at his family farm in Hardanger destroyed the major part of his output. What remains of his scores and manuscript music, however, bears witness to a thoroughly unique life´s work as a composer. On this album, the harpist Turid Kniejski and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, under conductor Per Dreier, performs several of these remaining works.

Geirr Tveitt was born in the part of Norway from which the Norwegian national instrument, the Hardanger fiddle, and characteristic features of Hardanger music form a melodius and rhythmic undercurrent in several of his works – not least in his “A Hundred Folk Tunes from Hardanger”. Tveitt transcribed over 1000 folk tunes, and this work is an orchestral arrangement of 100 of these. They were grouped into suites, fifteen folk melodies in each, with only four of these surviving to this day. Here, the first of these are performed, “small gems of musical inventiveness,” as one critic has described it, together with Tveitt´s original and fascinating “Harp Concerto No. 2”, characterised by a rare musical imagination, and “Nykken”, with its subtitle “A symphonic painting for orchestra”, based on an old Norwegian tale laying the symphonic shape of the orchestral work.