Thoresen: Lyden av Arktis – Kluxen

A whole orchestra devoted to the far north — it sounds, on paper, like a bureaucratic dream, the sort of cultural initiative that gets funded by ministries eager to prove that Norway’s remotest provinces deserve their own resident ensemble. But the Arktisk Filharmoni is real, based in Tromsø and Bodø, and Lasse Thoresen’s hour-long Lyden av Arktis was written to give the band an identity, a calling card, a piece that could travel and say: this is who we are, this is where we come from, look at the ice.

Thoresen doesn’t circulate much outside Scandinavia. A pity, because he studied with Ligeti and Xenakis and has spent a career worrying at the border between notated pitch and the messier acoustic phenomena — overtones, microtonal smears, the harmonic residue that Western staff notation was never built to capture. His theoretical writings on “aural sonology” are formidable. You can hear that background in the piece’s opening gesture: wind-tones bleeding out of the string section, no clear pitch center, just breath and bow noise conjuring — we’re told — “a huge white landscape.” It’s an atmospheric conceit, and for about ninety seconds it’s genuinely unsettling, in the way a held pedal tone in Sibelius’s Tapiola is unsettling. Then the winds arrive, the birds flutter up out of muted brass in “Sky, Flocks and Flight,” and the piece settles into a pattern it never quite escapes: gesture, effect, gesture, effect, a conveyor belt of northern-lights postcards.

I don’t say this without sympathy. Landscape music is brutally hard to bring off, because the composer has to invent structural logic where the terrain itself has none — glaciers don’t develop thematically, they just sit there being enormous. Sibelius solved this by working obliquely, through implication and silence. Vaughan Williams, in the Sinfonia Antartica, solved it by stealing wholesale from his own film score and letting the wordless soprano do the work no orchestra can do alone. Thoresen, less patient, reaches for the block chord: the Looming Glacier movement announces its mass with slabs of orchestral sound piled up fortissimo. You admire the engineering — this is a plush, transparent disc, 2L’s usual multichannel excellence, strings you can almost place by desk — while wondering if bigger is really the same as more meaningful.

The Sami material in “Encounters Recalled” is where the piece comes alive for me. There’s a joiku-inflected melodic line threaded through darker string writing, and for a few minutes Thoresen abandons illustration for something like elegy — an acknowledgment that this landscape has been inhabited, sung about, argued over, for millennia before any philharmonic showed up to commission tone poems about it. “Fiddle Feasts” is good unpretentious fun, fiddle tunes stomped through the orchestra with a Bartókian relish for regional color. But then comes “Hymn to the Untouched,” the emotional crux, an extended modal melody rising out of overtone-saturated harmony — Thoresen’s pet obsession made audible — and here the piece nearly earns its ambitions. Nearly. The tune is lovely, patiently unfolded, the orchestra glowing rather than glaring for once. Then “Collapse” arrives to remind us of “humankind’s inevitable apocalypse,” all clangor and percussion, and the whole apparatus of Statement feels, again, a little too eager to tell you what to feel and when.

Christian Kluxen conducts with evident conviction. You sense a band that believes in this score, playing it as if their institutional existence depended on the belief, which in some sense it does. The strings in the hymn movement have real bloom; the brass in the glacier music has the weight without turning to mud. STORMEN’s hall gives 2L’s engineers a warm, wide canvas, and the SACD layer rewards a good system with startling depth of field — you can hear individual desks of cellos breathing.

But I keep returning to the shadow of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, eighteen minutes where taped birdsong and orchestra achieve something Thoresen’s sixty-five don’t quite manage: restraint, mystery, the sense of a landscape that doesn’t need our apocalyptic subtitles to matter. Messiaen, too, listened to birds and geology and found in them a theology, not just a travelogue. Lyden av Arktis is often skillful, sometimes ravishing, occasionally moving. And finally over-explained, a nature documentary with the narration turned up too loud. Worth hearing once, for the hymn alone. I doubt I’ll return to it the way I return to Tapiola.