Schaathun, Asbjørn: Lament 9′

WP Copenhagen, 2000. Frode Haltli, accordion

Can a modern atonal work be a lament without also grieving over its lost, romantic melody? The answer must be yes; ‘Lament’ by the Norwegian composer Asbjørn Schaathun, written for and dedicated to Frode Haltli, is this kind of work. Classically structured in its composition with clean, limited formal elements, Schaathun makes use of the polyphonic potentiality of the accordion to make the instrument as it were engaged in a dialogue with its own points of extremity. Is what we hear the survivors’ conversation with the dead or are they quarrelling with each other? Or is it the soul’s conversation with itself or its God that we listen to, before the voices are brought together and the work now moves onwards purposefully, but with a different resistance which is not from without, of the wind, the weather, but an inner, reflective, serious resistance challenging the work, before the composition fades out in a beautiful, elegiac falsetto, the brief farewell and ascent of the soul. (Erland Kiøsterud)