Live performance on web TV

The performance of Arne Nordheim’s ‘Spur’ with Frode Haltli and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya from November 10th 2012 is available on NRK2 web TV (see 16 minutes into the program!). The concert marked the release of the new album ‘Arne Nordheim Complete Accordion Works‘ (Simax 2012).

Arne Nordheim’s concerto for accordion and orchestra was written in 1975 for the Danish accordion virtuoso Mogens Ellegaard, and the 26 minutes long version Frode Haltli recorded with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted by Christian Eggen in 2011 is the main work of the Nordheim Album.

The publisher Edition Wilhelm Hansen writes about ‘Spur’ that it is ‘a large-scale concerto for accordion and orchestra which was commisioned by the Südwestfunk Orchestra in Baden-Baden. As already indicated above, through his relationship to traditional historical forms, Nordheim seeks to recapture the correspondence of these forms with the social dynamic which gave birth to them. The history of the concerto as a medium of communication is without any doubt closely interlinked with its role as intermediary between social convention and individual freedom and the process through which individual creativity is absorbed to become common property, leaving behind footprints and signposts in culture. The title can also be likened to the footprints left behind by the solo instrument as it explores the open orchestral landscape created by the stereophonic arrangement of the instruments, as well as to the footprints left by the surroundings themselves on the solo instrument’s own patterns of reaction.’

In the liner notes of Frode Haltli’s new CD Ole Henrik Moe writes about how the musical ideas used in the opening of ‘Spur’ originally were a part of a trombone concerto for Vinko Globokar that never was completed!

(Photo: Knut Utler)