As If The Law Is Everything
Still Panic
Robert Schumann's Dicterliebe

Henrik Hellstenius’s intense yet unassuming exploration of the interacting worlds of sound and time has spanned more than three decades. That hunger for discovery is perhaps the single most unifying feature across his life and work. It was already forming rapidly in his youth, from his teenage years spent listening to Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek to his studies of spectral music with Gérard Grisey in Paris.

In between, Hellstenius studied musicology at the University of Oslo and composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where he is now a professor. Even then, Hellstenius was only interested in looking forward. Presently, his music is best heard as an intense reflection on the times we’re in, each piece the culmination of a slate-cleaning hunt for new sounds and delivery techniques that best serve the text (or subtext) in question and often draw out rich assets from minimal or unassuming material.

The composer’s many concertante works, like his operas, tell real-life stories – whether personal and narrative or purely coloristic and abstracted. The mostly vocal works in this collection offer an inside track on the composer’s response to idea and text, full of ‘presence’ and in the present tense, even when elements of the subject matter hark back to the past – to musical or constitutional foundation stones. They reveal the sort of fresh and fragmented lyricism that, in so many of the composer’s works (vocal or otherwise), barely allows itself to be heard.

---

Recordings: Grieghallen, Bergen, 27 28 November 2017 (Tr. 1-7), 14 15 April 2016 (Tr. 8), 11 September 2020 (Tr. 9-16). Diego Lucchesi is a Buffet Crampon artist and plays on Licostini mouthpieces.