Arne Nordheim never quite got his due on this side of the Atlantic. The Norwegians knew — they gave him every honor the state could bestow, and he lived long enough, dying in 2010, to see himself regarded as a national monument — but outside Scandinavia his electroacoustic and orchestral work remained the province of specialists and the adventurously curious. This disc, built around the accordion playing of Frode Haltli, makes a strong case that the neglect has been real and costly.
Start with Spur.
The concerto dates from 1975, written for the Danish accordionist Mogens Ellegaard, who spent years — literally years, through persistent Christmas cards — badgering composers into taking his instrument seriously. It worked. Nordheim responded with something that sounds like nothing else in the concerto literature: a 26-minute arc of slowly accumulating tension in which the accordion’s inherent duality — the bellows breathing, the reeds sustaining, the left hand churning out bass while the right reaches for something lyrical and strange — becomes an argument about time itself. The opening glissandi alone will stop you cold. They don’t announce anything. They simply are, shimmering at the edge of audibility, and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra under Christian Eggen seems to materialize around them rather than accompany them.
Eggen is a director I’ve followed intermittently, and here he earns real admiration. The orchestra’s contribution to Spur is transparent without being thin — Nordheim’s orchestration keeps pulling textures apart to reveal new inner voices, and Eggen never lets the ensemble smother Haltli’s instrument in the process. Which matters, because the accordion can disappear into a full orchestra with alarming ease. It doesn’t here.
Haltli himself is the revelation. He studied with Ellegaard, carries that lineage with evident seriousness, and plays with a physical commitment — you can practically hear the bellows reversals, the micro-pressures that give each note its color — that transforms what might be mere technical display into something like eloquence. His ECM recording Looking on Darkness already announced a major artist. Spur confirms it.
The two middle works are a different matter, though not without interest. Signals, from 1967, places Haltli alongside electric guitarist Raoul Björkenheim and percussionist Hans-Kristian Kjos Sørensen in a six-movement piece that wears its late-60s avant-garde credentials openly: angular serialism, improvisatory “moments,” gestures that belonged to a specific historical argument and know it. The work has aged unevenly. Certain passages feel like dispatches from a world that settled its arguments long ago; others — particularly where the three instruments find a shared rhythmic pulse and then deliberately abandon it — retain their capacity to unsettle. Björkenheim’s electric guitar is sharp-edged throughout, and that abrasiveness keeps the piece from sliding into mere period charm.
Dinosauros (1971) and Flashing (1986) round out the program as solo accordion pieces, the former more overtly theatrical in its demands, the latter more introspective — though Nordheim’s introspection always carries a slight menace, a sense that the quiet surface might rupture at any moment. Both repay close listening, and Haltli dispatches them with authority.
A word about the album itself: the decision to separate the accordion’s left and right channels into discrete stereo speakers produces an occasionally disorienting effect, as though the instrument has been stretched across the room. It’s a choice that emphasizes the accordion’s physical mechanics rather than its musical presence, and I’m not sure it serves the music. But the engineering is otherwise outstanding — detailed, present, alive.
None of this is easy listening, and it shouldn’t be. Nordheim was after something harder and stranger than easy. He mostly found it. So does this disc.
