There are composers who arrive without fanfare, without the machinery of major-label promotion or conservatory pedigree, and ask only that you listen. Martin Romberg — Norwegian, born 1978, largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic — is one of them. This disc is a surprise, and not a small one.
The Symphony of Saints takes its three dedicatees from the early Christian north of England: Columba, Aidan, Cuthbert — figures of austere holiness, men who prayed on wind-scoured islands and left behind them a tradition of illuminated manuscript and plainchant that still haunts the imagination. Romberg has written music that feels answerable to that inheritance. It opens with a rocking, almost pendular motion — a lullaby and a liturgy at once — and the effect is immediately disarming. No grand gestures. No attempt to overwhelm. Just that steady, consoling undulation, the orchestral writing warmly layered, and underneath it all a pulse, patient and insistent, like a heartbeat or a ticking clock in a very quiet room.
Joanne Lunn’s soprano enters and the music sharpens into focus. Her voice has an imperious clarity, clean of the woolliness that afflicts so many singers working in this quasi-devotional idiom — one thinks inevitably of the young Janet Baker, though Lunn’s tone is leaner, less upholstered. She shapes a phrase and then releases it, and the release is as important as the shaping.
The four-movement structure unfolds without haste. Second-movement mysticism — there’s a passage that briefly evokes Peter Warlock at his most inward, something like “The Frostbound Wood” stripped of its chill — gives way to what can only be called supplication. The symphony’s final pages amount to a slow exhalation, a breath let out after long holding. It is, frankly, moving. Whether Romberg has absorbed Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs consciously or not, the kinship is real: that same quality of patient, undefended feeling, music that refuses irony as a matter of principle.
Andrew Griffiths and the Orchestra of the Swan recorded the symphony at St. John the Evangelist Church in Oxford, a space that lends the strings a gentle bloom without muddying the ensemble’s articulation. The balance is right.
The Sacred Songs, recorded separately at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, pair Lunn with Romberg himself at the piano. A different intimacy now — more exposed, more searching. There is a faintly jazz-inflected quality to the piano writing here, something chromatic and sidelong that recalls neither Górecki nor Warlock but rather, unexpectedly, the world of Finzi. The comparisons that come to mind most readily — Holst’s Humbert Wolfe settings, Finzi’s In Terra Pax — are not diminishments. They locate the music within a lineage of English-language spiritual song that is neither churchy nor merely decorative.
Romberg is elsewhere drawn to fantasy literature — Tolkien, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard — and that eclecticism is worth noting. It suggests a composer who follows his imagination rather than his career. That is rarer than it sounds.
This is not music that will reorder anyone’s sense of the contemporary landscape. It has no interest in doing so. What it offers instead is honesty — unfashionable, unguarded, and, in the best moments of this album, quietly irresistible.
