Recordings

2016_06_GreenGround

Green Ground

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

2016

“There is a certain jazz-like feeling in the way [Kronos] plays Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s string quartets here… It is typically angular, asymmetrical and formally ‘unbalanced’ music, creating moods while thumbing its nose at classical form. Gudmundsen-Holmgreen combines the abrasive with the absurd. Just think of it as modern-day Dada, a sort of higher-level P.D.Q. Bach… This is a wonderfully imaginative recording, albeit one that’s pretty far off from center. I dare you to play it, loudly.”

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Lynn René Bayley, The Art Music Lounge

About the album

This album collects the world premiere recordings of a unique set of pieces by Danish composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen that were written and dedicated to Kronos Quartet and Theatre of Voices with conductor Paul Hillier.

Using a text from Henry VIII’s Songbook and taking musical inspiration from the old ‘ground’ technique and a certain famous Baroque canon, Green Ground offers independent layers of playful sounds for strings and voices and then merges them together to the accompaniment of wooden percussion instruments.

SELECT CREDITS

Kronos Quartet
David Harrington, violin
John Sherba, violin
Hank Dutt, viola
Jeffrey Zeigler, cello

Theatre of Voices
Else Torp, soprano
Signe Asmussen, mezzo-soprano
Christopher Watson, tenor
Jakob Bloch Jespersen, bass
Paul Hiller, artistic director

Recorded live at the Concert Hall of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, December 4, 2012

Recording producer and sound engineer: Preben Iwan

  1. No Ground (String Quartet No. 11 ): I
  2. No Ground: II
  3. No Ground: III
  4. No Ground: IV
    Performed by Kronos Quartet
  5. Green – “to the greenwood must we go, alas”
    Performed by Theatre of Voices
  6. No Ground Green: I
  7. No Ground Green: II
  8. No Ground Green: III
  9. No Ground Green: IV
    Performed by Kronos Quartet and Theatre of Voices
  10. New Ground (String Quartet No. 10)
    Performed by Kronos Quartet
  11. New Ground Green
    Performed by Kronos Quartet and Theatre of Voices

Released by Dacapo Records

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