Anders Nordentoft

It has been said that Anders Nordentoft’s music offers its listeners ‘an outstretched hand.’ His works are refreshingly free of dogma and take direct communication as their starting point, whether through clear narrative, sensual lyricism or an almost physical impulse that seizes the attention. The composer once claimed he set out to create music both ordinary and fantastic at the same time, like a normal day of the week.

Nordentoft studied violin and composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music with Ib Nørholm and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus with Per Nørgård. Over the course of a four-decade career writing music, he has exercised extreme discipline - prioritizing structural coherence while insisting it convey the bigger picture of life on earth. The composer’s theatre piece On This Planet (2002) proved a landmark in Nordic music theatre, a work that forged a new idiom from the varied strands of Nordentoft’s creative work. It communicated the essence of human life with straightforwardness and passion.  

A strong rhythmic emphasis characterized many of Nordentoft’s works of the 1980s. The orchestral score Entgegen (1985) judders forwards with driving insistence. The solo cello work Cathedral (1985) weaves a single thread that builds huge cumulative power, expanding to fill the space implied by its title. The orchestral work Born (1986) probes issues of ethics and destiny, originally marking the 25^th anniversary of its commissioner, Amnesty International. 

In the decade that followed, that focus began to link arms with sensuality, lyricism and harmonic depth. The Shadow of This Lip (1990) for soprano, violin and piano with a text by Sylvia Plath adumbrates a new sensitivity to melody while Zenevera sesio (1992) for ensemble generates a hovering, looping sound-space inspired by Michael Strunge’s psychedelic poem. Distant Night Ship (1996) casts the orchestra as a huge glinting object. The cello concerto Light Imprisoned (originally Sweet Kindness, 1996) consists of an arching structure pinned into place by two cadenzas, the solo cello playing a searching elegy in between.  

Both those scores were, in a sense, archetype Nordentoft -establishing an atmosphere and then examining it like a prism in rotation. Light Imprisoned, in particular, features a classically Nordic exploration of light (often by means of harmonics), while its rigid structure is echoed in the through-line of HillShapes-WindStillness (2000) and the organization of Pointed Out (2006), in which an existing kit-of-parts is re-assembled over time. The same sort of poetic logic, linked to the unfolding patterns propagated by the Aarhus School, exists in the piano trio Doruntine (1994) where the structural DNA is unraveled with great beauty. In Hymne (1996), block chords are deconstructed as notes are removed one by one.  

For two years from 2020, Nordentoft was composer-in-residence with Denmark’s foremost new music ensemble, Athelas Sinfonietta. He had previously written the ensemble piece Stream (2017) for Athelas, a tight, rhetoric-free conversation for chamber ensemble whose velocity is determined by its own undercurrents of unease.  

That work was followed by the first fruit of the residency, Balcony (2020) - a ‘complete, small symphony’ celebrating the composer’s obsession with balconies and the unusual perspective they offer on the world. There are Nordentoft hallmarks all over the piece, which carries with it the feeling of a delicate sculpture. In 2023 Balcony, with Stream, was released in a new recording by Dacapo. 

Many more Nordentoft works are driven by the idea of combining unlikely partners which maintain their independence. Dance of Separation (1998) is a vigorous workout for string sextet in which two elements bound by tension are prized apart. In City of Threads (1994), individuals face up to the threatening grandeur of the city while recurring, repeating notes convey the endless cycle of urban life.

That idea was taken forward in City Trance (2019), a frenetic score for solo piano that looks at various urban landscapes with a marked sense of perspective, as if viewing them from the windows of a skyscraper (foreshadowing Balcony). It won the Carl Prize in 2021 and came in the midst of a clutch of piano works including the enchanting portrait of a spider’s day in three movements for piano, Edderkop (2018, recorded by Dacapo in 2021), Rumours (2020), Roads for Piano (2023) and To Manuel (2022). 

Directly expressive vocal music has been a consistent thread through Nordentoft’s career. On This Planet (2002) is a series of wild, free-spirited songs that present a picture of one man’s journey through life and the fleeting spaciousness of existence. These were followed by song cycles that leave similarly powerful residues. Noch du bist du da (2018) set German verse by Rose Ausländer for soprano, piano and viola with a combination of spoken acuity, lyrical delicacy and pianistic focus that tapped the German lied tradition. Days I Have Held (2019), for high voice, clarinet, percussion and double bass, is a cutting, crystalline setting of poems by Derek Walcott.

Anders Nordentoft has written over 70 published works for orchestras and ensembles of all sizes and configurations and has taught composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He was awarded the Carl Nielsen Prize in 1997, the Edition Wilhelm Hansen Award in 2002 and the Carl Prize in 2021.

Andrew Mellor, 2019 & 2023