Bjarne Brustad

Bjarne Brustad (1895-1978) was born in Oslo. He studied composition and violin at the Music Conservatory in Oslo, and also in Berlin, where his teachers included Gustav Lange, Emil Telmanyi, and Carl Flesch. He made his debut as a violinist in Oslo in 1914, and for many years he played the violin and viola with the Philharmonic Society Orchestra in the Norwegian capital; from 1928 to 1943 he was solo-viola player with this orchestra. He has taught composition and violin at the Norwegian State Academy of Music, and in 1951 he was granted kunstnerlønn (the annuityawarded by the State). Brustad was always alert to trends and happenings in the musical world at large, and he was one of the first Norwegians to embrace Impressionism. A good example is provided by his Oriental Suite for orchestra (1920). In the 1930´s he was to some extent taken up with Norwegian folklore and neo-classisism, and in 1950 or thereabouts he radicalised his tone language, stopping short, however, of becoming an atonalist. Since the mid-1960s he tended to forsake such tone-language, and his recent compositions are all endowed with a simple musicality; they are, he said, ”music for ordinary people”. Occupying a central position among Brustad´s compositions are the opera Atlantis (1945), four violin concertos, three string quartets, and his nine symphonies (1948-74). His works bear the stamp of an accomplished musician´s complete command of his instruments and of a highly developed feeling for sophisticated instrumentation. Brustad´s first three symphonies appeared between 1948 and 1953, and they all reflect their origin in a troubled and disquieting period of world history. In his autobiography Brustad writes: ”The most characteristic feature of the modern world is fear. Another is that civilisation is dominated by technology. Even social tensions and racial clashes pale into insignifiance beside the fact that among the thousands of possibilites opened up by technology, one, the possibility of destroying the world altogether, overshadows all else.” These symphonies are not constructed to a specific programme, but the composer´s own wartime experiences and the contemporary insight he aquired during the war and postwar years have enabled him to remould his impressions and present them in their present garb.