Sæverud: Complete Piano Music – Einar Røttingen

Harald Sæverud´s complete piano music

“There are hundreds of melodies waiting to be written,” Harald Sæverud once said. Certainly, but it requires an exceptional alertness to capture them in flight, an alertness which Sæverud possessed to an unusual degree. He was able to see and hear things that escape most of us. Everything in Sæverud´s music is very much his own: the angular shape of his melodies, his harmonic language, his handling of rhythm and his very unique orchestration. Sæverud´s music can be at times achingly beautiful but he refuses to ingratiate the ear for too long: he puts the listener into his own shoes as receiver of the very diverse impulses of life and Nature – the beautiful, yes, but also the implacable, the grotesque, the funny and even the ugly.

Harald Sæverud is thought of by many as the greatest and most distinctive composer in Norway since Edvard Grieg, and as a symphonic composer there is no one from his homeland that can challenge this position. However, in contrast to the many opus in grand format, he also wrote a great number of piano pieces – a second pillar of his list of works and include some of his most popular compositions. On this 3CD album, pianist Einar Røttingen has compiled and recorded Sæverud´s entire ouevre for piano.

The rise of a new generation of commited interpreters, such as Einar Røttingen, is essential to his precious music´s gaining of a larger number of commited listeners. Einar Røttingen was born in Bergen in 1963. Since his highly-acclaimed Oslo debut in 1987, Røttingen has appeared as a soloist with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sønderjylland Symphony Orchestra. His performances reflect his wide-range interest in the music of different styles and periods, with a special enthusiasm for contemporary music. Both as a performer and pedagogue, Røttingen distinguishes himself with a strong urge to communicate and to seek new paths within repertoire as well as teaching. As one critic wrote: “he has like few others an ability to identify himself with the music.”